FREE NOW Mobility App has announced the integration of Yooz automated purchase-to-pay (P2P) software to simplify its accounts payable services in the UK.
With Yooz, invoices emailed from suppliers are now automatically recorded, analysed, and processed for payment, without the need for human intervention. The platform is backed up by AI, Machine Learning, and Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology which makes it faster, more accurate, and more secure than manual processes.
Based in Germany, FREE NOW is a mobility app with more than 56 million users across 16 countries and over 170 cities. Its success story started in 2009 with taxi rides and now offers now a wide range of different mobility services.
In 2020, FREE NOW integrated with the French company Kapten that was already using Yooz. Finding the solution perfect to collect the invoices of all its subsidiaries, FREE NOW adopted Yooz to centralise its accounting process.
The implementation process started with Austria, the country that had at that time the smallest number of invoices. Once the teams felt comfortable with Yooz and the new processes, other entities followed with the same logic: countries with smaller volume of invoices first - such as Poland, France, UK, Ireland, Spain Portugal, Italy, Austria and Romania - and the biggest one, Germany, at the end.
In total FREE NOW onboarded 10 subsidiaries in 6 months, Austria starting in April 2021 and Germany finishing the tour in October 2021. “The accounting team used to spend one to two weeks to process an invoice as they had to juggle with different systems. Getting an approval could take a long time as well. Now the whole treatment process only takes 3 to 4 days,” says Mira.
Each team followed some workshops to learn how to use Yooz depending on their role in the invoice management process, with live and on-demand training sessions set up to make sure everyone got the most out of the platform.
All the European invoice management for FREE NOW is made from Germany except for the French entity that has its own. Invoices of all countries arrive by email and are automatically captured and collected in Yooz, with the accounting team quickly checking invoices and sending them for approval thanks to predetermined workflows. Once invoices are approved, they are exported into a CSV file and uploaded in the ERP system to process the payment.
Thanks to Yooz, this process became fluid for all subsidiaries. They now know in real time where their invoices are in the process and have access to all the history of their invoices as well. Of course, confidentiality is respected, and the teams can only see the documents they are responsible for.
“This has been particularly useful for the marketing teams, as they had to work with several different systems before (one for each entity) and now with everything centralized they win efficiency,” says Mira. The next step is to automate the purchasing process. “We are one step close to make life easier for the procurement team!” Mira adds.