An automated solution for European-wide bank upload and electronic payment process
Essentra specialises in the supply of plastic and fibre products. Their global network spans 33 countries and includes 53 manufacturing facilities.
Essentra Netherlands approached Cashbook in order to automate their bank upload process and also their electronic payment process with the twin goals in mind of reducing costs and cutting processing time.
Challenge
To automate and streamline the manually intensive bank upload and electronic payment processes
Prior to the Cashbook implementation, Essentra’s business process involved:
- Large amount of time spent on manually posting the bank statement into the ERP.
- Applying cash manually for accounts receivable.
- No automated control over posting bank statement entries.
- Manual Bank Reconciliation using excel spreadsheets.
- Banking fees, charges all keyed manually into ERP system.
- No ERP integration around their electronic payment process.
- Manual keying of all foreign payment into banking software.
Solution
Cashbook. A globally used cash automation solution
The automated bank statement upload and the electronic payment solution was designed and tested with Essentra Netherlands and Poland. The implementation was designed over a staged basis as at the time, Essentra were undergoing a BPCS rollout.
The bank statement is uploaded daily into Cashbook and during the upload process mixed transactions are identified and the corresponding action automatically processed as required.
Bank balance and statement validation also formed part of the solution to ensure that balance information was readily available for forecasting purposes and that statement control existed to ensure that bank statements were not uploaded more than once.
Cashbook implemented the ClieOp03 file format for domestic payments and subsequently SEPA such that Essentra was able to use Cashbook for automated domestic electronic payments. A reference field containing the vendor number was included in the outgoing payment file as part of the solution. This ensured that it was referenceable on the incoming bank statement file where it could be automatically processed to the AP clearing account.
For foreign payments, Essentra Poland decided to continue with the existing process of keying the payments into ING banking software and as part of the process use a particular reference code, which Cashbook uses to recognise the transaction on the incoming bank statement file. The Cashbook upload process then identifies the vendor number (in the Netherlands) and closes the open AP foreign invoices in BPCS.
Full Bank & ERP Integration
Seamless integration with existing ERP system
- All transactions dealt with during one upload process.
- Customers automatically identified in the UK bank statement upload files.
- Banking fees automatically identified and coded during bank upload processes.
More Advanced Intelligence
Let technology do the work; save time and resource by massively reducing manual entry
- Automated solution for processing the bank statement.
- Bank statement processing time considerably reduced – after implementation, three daily bank statements now processing in just 15 minutes.
- Reduction in bank charges as multiple payments are included in one electronic payment file.
- Bank upload recognises mixed transactions included in the MT940 file, e.g. receipts, AP payments, direct debits, bank charges and statement only items.
- Eliminated the requirement to post manual journals in BPCS for statement only items which are now automated.
- Automated solution for domestic AP payment runs.
- Ability to make electronic domestic vendor payments from multiple bank accounts.
- Vendor bank details conversion from legacy system automated.
- Reduction in time taken to complete payment runs.
Greater Financial Control
A clearer window into cash management for Essentra
- Statement control included in the bank upload process.
- Additional IBAN codes now accommodated in Cashbook vendor files which is not available in BPCS.
Results
Process in just 15 minutes
“The team at Cashbook have been a pleasure to work with, and we look forward to increasing the scope of the application across the division in the future.”
