One single software solution to streamline cash application, bank reconciliation, and vendor payments.
A growing company with multi-faceted cash automation needs.
Makita Corporation was founded in 1915 as an electric motor sales and repair company. Today, as a global brand in over 40 countries, Makita is an innovation leader, manufacturing best-in-class products at 10 plants operating in 8 countries. The unmatched quality and durability of Makita products is driven by the company’s strong R&D capabilities and have earned the trust of professional users worldwide. Every day, on jobsites around the world, Makita delivers the power, performance and durability that professional users demand with products that are more compact and feel better.
Challenge
With Makita’s global business expanding, they required an intelligent financial software tool. One which was easy to use, and good enough to deal with the significant increase in the number of vendor payments and customer invoices. Makita UK are using Infor LX as their ERP system. Prior to the Cashbook implementation, the company was struggling with:
- Manually using ACR500 to work on cash application in LX8.2.
- Making manual vendor payments by using LX ACP functions.
- Manual entry of electronic payments into home banking software.
- Managing the various methods required for cash application involving both customer receipts/vendor payments and GL splits.
- Using traditional Excel sheets to work on bank reconciliation.
Solution
All these manual and outdated processes were taking up unnecessary hours spent on Makita UK’s cash application, bank reconciliation, and payments functions. Makita UK was looking for a cash management software solution that could automate all of these processes. They chose Cashbook to help them move to a more modernized process of automating cash.
With the Cashbook software now in place, Makita UK was able to enjoy a fully automated process for their bank reconciliation, cash application, and payments functions. Full integration between the bank and ERP was realized along with greater cash visibility and improved cash flow. Through this automation, Cashbook helped to remove all of the previous manual work being undertaken. Giving Makita UK back the time being lost resulted in significant improvements to their finance department. See below for more detailed results on this major transformation:
Newly automated processes leading to improved efficiency
- Bank Reconciliation updates with regular automatic bank statements imports.
- The Bank Reconciliation process is completed on time, all the time, which avoids the dreaded end of month rush.
- Miscellaneous journals and automatic write-offs are now created with Bank Reconciliation in Cashbook.
- Manual ACR journals are created daily, by different collectors, which now automatically updates the sub ledger, general ledger and bank reconciliation.
- On a weekly basis, payments are made to vendors through a simple selection process by the required due date.
- Customised transmission files are created automatically and uploaded to Makita’s bank software.
Getting the bank and ERP to talk to each other
- Full integration is now possible between the bank and the Infor LX ERP system.
- A simple single payment selection process which updates both Infor LX and the bank.
- Getting the bank and Infor LX data onto the same screen, for improved visibility.
- Work undertaken on the bank data, now automatically updates Infor LX.
Simple but intelligent payment process
- One single selection to pay all outstanding AP invoices, inclusive of all bank currencies and payment types.
- Easy to adjust payment run by adding a de-selection function.
- Automatically create customised payment files to meet the different bank requirements.
- Automatic email remittance function to send out all payment remittance with just one press of a button.
Greater Financial Control
- Easy to review receipts and see a full payment history log.
- Simple navigation to review all open AR and AP invoices with Cashbook.
- Greater visibility of daily, weekly, and monthly bank account balances.
- Superior control of vendor bank information changes.
Results
Since Makita started using Cashbook, we have reduced our time spent on cash management by about 45%. Cashbook completely automated the Bank Rec process for us, by connecting our ERP to our banking data. There is a great team working in Cashbook, they really listened to the issues we were having, then tailored their software to resolve these issues, and delivered consistently high levels of automation.
