Company information
About the customer
Coop consists of more than 180 Coop supermarkets supported by the service office. More than 680,000 incoming invoices are processed there every year. These invoices are handled centrally by the financial team in Velp.
Challenges
The main reasons for optimizing the invoice process within Coop were a fast and safe circulation of invoices, more efficient interaction between Coop and the purchasing organization, and lower costs for processing invoices. This new process had to meet several requirements. The process had to ensure fast processing, booking, and payment of all incoming invoices from one integrated system. Jan van Boeijen, Head of Finance: “Before we switched to an automated invoice processing solution, we processed our incoming invoices with outdated software. After the merger, we were looking for an integrated system that could process electronic and paper invoices, replacing all our old packages. ”
Integration software ReadSoft and SAP
Coop started preparations for the invoice automation project a year before implementation. The new method facilitates the matching of purchase orders with invoices, which is essential for optimizing the entire process.
All incoming invoices are opened, sorted, scanned, verified, and archived. The information will transfer to the control center, and post the invoice. The ReadSoft solution checks the data, matches the invoices with purchase orders, automates the allocation, and streamlines approval, both routinely and with exceptions. Thanks to this optimized process, all incoming invoices are booked in SAP within one day, with more than 20,000 invoices per week; this is a “must”!
Jan van Boeijen
Head of Finance - Coop supermarkets
Digital progression from entry to payment
Invoices come in all shapes and sizes, 92% of the invoices come electronically within the other 8% are paper invoices. Coop needs a process that can prevent errors in the input and approval processes. A process that allows them to process all invoices automatically. The automated process enables Coop to process and post all purchase invoices (MM) and cost invoices (FI) in SAP with minimal manual intervention regardless of format, paper, or iDoc / EDI (electronic invoices). During the implementation, Coop took on various challenges such as processing different VAT rates, processing debit and credit amounts on one invoice, packaging processing, EAN code processing, return processing, and discovering price differences between orders and invoices. All the projects are successfully completed.
Jan van Boeijen
Head of Finance - Coop supermarkets
Increased efficiency
The ReadSoft solution is used daily by Coop. Thanks to the integration with SAP and the simple search and user interface, it takes less than a day to get used to the new software. The finance team was impressed with how easily they can now process invoices. Besides, the electronic image of the invoice can be easily retrieved from the archive.