Financial Director specialists use BPA Platform to automate invoicing processes and increase reporting capabilities
Codeless Platforms today revealed that The FD Centre, which provides part-time Finance Director services to the SME sector around the globe, has improved efficiency, reduced costs and taken greater control over data following the deployment of Codeless Platforms’ Portal for SAP Business One and BPA Platform. The FD Centre has now automated the process of raising invoices/credit notes and increased its reporting capabilities.
“The first benefit received is the saving of time. From a finance perspective, having automated the billing process, we are saving around three to four days a month in the UK alone. Once each country is added, I believe we’re going to save a month of an individual’s time. I estimate it will save us around £50,000 per annum in time / monetary savings. The system will ultimately pay for itself (and some),” revealed Wayne Smith, Financial Controller, The FD Centre.
Codeless Platforms’ dedicated portal for SAP Business One provides organisations with the ability to easily build and/or deploy a portal solution that provides users with a single point of access to company data held within SAP Business One. With the addition of BPA Platform, all business systems can be integrated allowing for the automation of data transfers.
“The biggest issue we had was each month-end we had to download the CSVs from Calypso (an old custom billing system), doctor the information and then upload each sales and purchase invoice into SAP Business One via Data Transfer Workbench. That used to take the best part of a day to complete; that was the main issue we faced. Following the build, all invoices are now automated within the system, which allows us to control data,” said Smith.
“The other thing which took an inordinate amount of time, was maintaining a list of customer receipts, and which Financial Director (FD) or Regional Director (RD) invoices needed to be paid. The system links a sales invoice to FD / RD invoices and automatically unblocks FD and RD invoices once sales invoices are marked as paid, from within SAP Business One. Again, that’s a huge time saving.”
“The third time saving is the speed of sending reports. The data and information we get enables us to start making decisions quicker and at a higher level. One of the reasons we’re trying to bring each country in house is having visibility of what’s happening in each country.”
Information is extremely important for The FD Centre, especially utilisation and forecasting. Previously, the organisation was reliant on asking each Regional Director (27 in the UK alone), to look at their forecasts and predict how many FDs they needed in each region, to help grow the business.
“The trouble was, RDs didn’t really have accurate / up-to-date information of their utilisation or forecast. We use the billing platform to produce and automate utilisation and forecasting reports. For example, a financial director will enter the number of days they wish to work in the following month, and what they are forecasting to work with each client. We get this information monthly via the platform, and are now aware of three utilisation metrics, namely FD, regional and country utilisation,” explained Smith.
“Our companywide utilisation needs to be between 60-70%. As a company we try to work as closely to 60% utilisation as possible. Anything lower than 60% means you haven’t got enough work for each FD and, therefore, the FD may leave. Any higher than 70%, there is a possibility you can’t take on additional clients, as we wouldn’t have enough FDs to grow the business. Since implementing this project the reporting has given us an accurate utilisation percentage. This provides our people team with automated information, meaning the team can be more proactive rather than reactive. This will benefit each country as we continue to implement the platform globally.”
About The FD Centre
The brainchild of founder Colin Mills, The FD Centre was established in 2001. It was the first business to provide part-time Finance Director services in the UK. The original concept for The FD Centre was to provide the skill sets of experienced Finance Directors of large corporations to the small and medium sized enterprise (SME) sector, allowing smaller organisations to benefit from the expertise of a highly experienced Financial Director without incurring the expense of hiring someone full-time. The FD Centre has now expanded across the world to be the Global No.1 provider of part-time FD and CFO services.
About Codeless Platforms
Founded in 1999, Codeless Platforms is a highly experienced and trusted software company that develops data integration, business process automation and rapid application development solutions. Our two flexible, powerful platforms – BPA Platform and Applications Platform – enable organisations to take full control over their data as well as respond to the rapidly changing demands of business today. Our knowledge of the marketplace and channel has grown in line with this development and established us as a highly experienced and reputable software company, working closely with partners and software vendors, such as Access, Epicor, Infor, Microsoft, Sage, SAP and SYSPRO, who have the confidence to invest in Codeless Platforms. With over 450 global partners, more than 8000 customers use Codeless Platforms’ software solutions, ranging from diverse global organisations to the small local enterprise. The company is headquartered in Poole, UK, with representative offices throughout the world.
