Efficiency and visibility of vendor invoices in aged care

myHomecare process 50,000 invoices each month from small vendors for mowing, cleaning, meals and transport services to large platform providers with hundreds of staff provided.

They use Sage X3 to ensure that their operations are running smoothly, however, the volume of paperwork puts an enormous administrative burden on the operational and finance teams.

“In one of our organisations, we were processing about 14,000 invoices a month, which created a significant amount of work just to route for approval and then record it correctly. It was causing a lot of rework and delaying the Statements that go out to our clients. Of those invoices, 83% of them had a client charge related to them, and I was concerned that human error might mean that the invoice was not as accurate as we require, and we couldn’t deliver the very best for our clients,” said myHomecare CEO Stuart Miller.

“And given the margins that the industry works on, it would only take a small number of errors to impact the profitability; we could quickly be losing money.”

myHomecare turned to Redmap to automate the receipt and processing of their Vendor invoices.

They also needed to ensure that they had visibility on the invoices expected that month to manage the business’ cash flow.

“It wasn’t a straightforward process to automate because of the nature of the industry. We have a huge number of vendors and so many of them are sole proprietors, mum and dad organisations, working with no system or an unsophisticated system. About 3 to 5% of the invoices we receive are handwritten, and there’s no consistency to the way the information is displayed,” said Stuart. “Plus, the transactions have to be processed in two separate systems – the care system and Sage X3.”

“I am so happy that we implemented Redmap when we did, before the change in compliance legislation in Australia. With the automated approach, our visibility is complete; I can see every invoice and where it is.

As I started to work through the compliance requirements, I realised I needed different access to the data and had a bunch of reports that I needed written. Redmap had it turned around within 24 hours for me. They were incredibly responsive to anything we needed.”

“What the myHomecare team were doing was touching every invoice to route it to the right Care Manager based on the client in the care system. We expanded the data that we extracted from the invoice and located the client’s name and service date,” said Ben Woolley, Redmap CEO.

“This took an amount of effort to get right as there is no consistency in the invoices and where data is displayed. But now that the system is finely tuned, it means that the majority of invoices are skipping the first handling by the Accounts team and going straight to the Care Manager for approval.”

This data is then used to link the AP record with both Sage X3 and the care system record, and this means that the opportunity to miss revenue is removed, closing the gap.

“Implementing AP automation with Redmap will mean that 75% of the invoices, about 37,500 of our 50,000 a month, will go straight through to be processed without finance needing to do a thing. That’s an enormous efficiency gain,” said Stuart.