Keeping tabs on all the invoices and purchase orders accumulating at a single car dealership can be challenging, but imagine what a paperless accounts payable workflow looks like for a car dealership that represents multiple brands, maintains showrooms and repair shops in multiple locations, sometimes spread across a larger region or an entire state, and where several departments interact with the accounts payable team.
Luckily, there’s a solution that can really get the engine of a dealership roaring, no matter its size or how spread out its operations are. It’s called paperless Accounts Payable automation software.
So much paper, so little time is the lament by AP pros in a nutshell. Most automotive dealerships looking into automating their AP processes describe a long list of pain points. They deal with too many paper copies, which force them to spend time and money on shipping documents around and then find a solution for storing and properly shredding the sensitive information. Third, they talk about the difficulty finding documents during audits, and finally they lament a lack of accountability from management.
Not having the information you need to approve and pay invoices leads to several unnecessary problems in day-to-day operations that enters in accounting. The AP team -- and by extension the entire business -- suffers from a lack of visibility. As the old saying goes, you can only manage what you measure, so having to shuffle paper invoices triggers several unpleasant consequences. Coding errors occur when humans manually key in amounts whether it's for invoice processing or accounts payable reports. Invoices go missing when they're not retained in a digital file for processing and will inevitably lead to missed payments and all the complications that come with them (think late fees and squandered opportunities to reap early-pay discounts offered by certain vendors). Also, staff spend extra time handling emails from vendors who want to know when they’ll get paid.
Leveraging Paperless Accounts Payable Software Saves Time and Money
Yooz’s premium AP Automation platform can take care of all these problems in your manual process with one swoop. It’s the best cloud-based solution to collect and ingest paper invoices and documents from all the various dealership locations in a timely and most efficient manner while simultaneously storing them in the cloud for effortless approvals, searches and even audits.
Yooz saves its automotive customers on average 80 percent of their processing costs and cuts down cycle time from weeks to days from developing a unique paperless AP workflow to suit their individual needs through every step. It creates a whole new level of transparency and visibility that profoundly changes the way a dealership does business from procurement-to-payment without forcing its team to climb up a steep learning curve from receiving all the new information or being stumped by the advanced technology.
Getting started with Yooz takes little time. Usually, AP pros will be off to the races in about an hour, using their favorite browser or even mobile device. Even dealerships with a large geographical footprint accomplish the transition to a paperless world in a matter of months, simply by integrating Yooz into their existing Dealership Management System (DMS).
Don’t take our word for it. Several large dealerships are driving their bottom line with Yooz’s smart, powerful AP Automation solution and they all report outstanding results when it comes to efficiency, cost savings, ease of use, and overall team satisfaction with our paperless AP automation software.
Going Paperless Snuffed Out a Wildfire Accounting Process at Go Auto
Equally enthusiastic about moving to a paperless, cloud-based AP automation solution powered by Yooz is Shelley Duggins, AP manager for Canada-based Go Auto. It has the largest automotive inventory in Canada (12,000+ vehicles listed) and is headquartered in Edmonton, Alberta. Go Auto represents 21 auto brands at more than 40 dealerships, multiple repair and service centers, as well as several reconditioning facilities, in-house finance and insurance departments.
“The sheer volume of inventory and all of the parts and services that go along with it resulted in a payables process that was daunting and simply unmanageable”, according to Duggins whose AP group of 12 processes more than 17,000 documents a month. “We had a wildfire accounting process. Most of our work came from Parts and Service, and we had no efficient way of providing managers with reports that made sense, were current, or even accurate”.
When the company decided to automate its AP workflow with the goal of “getting a divorce from paper,” it selected Yooz because it was the only cloud-based AP automation solution that offered clear advantages for their business to transition to a digital system:
- Seamless integration with its DMS by CDK Global meant no hiccups in their workflow.
- Complete and transparent visibility into the invoice approval process.
- Ability to customize and scale as their business keeps growing.
- Easy to learn and use, no matter if the AP staff member is new or experienced.
Closing the month used to take five days at Go Auto, but thanks to Yooz that time has been reduced to half a day. “We’re meeting our targets, the information is correct, and we can move right into the accruals stage”, says Duggins about the smooth transition to Yooz’s paperless AP automation software.
No Longer Chasing Managers for Invoice Approvals at Peterson Auto Group
Finally, there’s Peterson Auto Group’s experience in Boise, Idaho. With its multiple dealerships, the AP team had to manually process invoices and cut around 2,500 checks a month, but only after the General Managers and Department Managers had approved every expense. Before Yooz, their previous workflow for invoice processing was neither simple nor streamlined.
“We’d have to physically take the invoices from store to store or email them and hope that they didn’t get overlooked”, explains Patsy Price, Director of Operations at Peterson. “Once a week, we’d do a ‘round robin’ to get the General Managers’ signatures on checks. One day, the stack would go to one manager, the next day to another. Our process felt a lot like herding cats”.
Price can point to a slew of efficiency gains and cost savings once Yooz was implemented and how it empowered Peterson Auto Group to shift all its dealerships to a paperless AP process:
- Entering an invoice used to take about five minutes, with Yooz it takes 15 seconds or less.
- Invoice approval dropped from an average of 45 minutes per invoice to just 5 minutes since invoices are now sent out for electronic signature before funds are electronically transferred.
- Paying bills now takes only about 15 minutes per day.
- The cost associated with cutting checks also dropped from about $5 per check to just $1.43, a savings of nearly $35,000 a year.
- Inquiries from vendors about invoice status can be answered instantly with a simple search in the browser, instead of consuming an hour’s worth of time hunting for paper copies.
With so much power under the hood, it’s no wonder that more and more auto dealerships are choosing Yooz. When it comes to paperless AP automation software, it’s simply the best way to do more with less.
