Automated cash application, global payments & reconciliation
Portmeirion was founded in 1960 by the legendary pottery designer Susan Williams-Ellis and her husband Euan Cooper-Willis. Portmeirion is now a growing company with global revenues in excess of £22 million per annum.
A key requirement is to streamline cash management processes across multiple locations, banks and currencies and increase visibility of funds from a global perspective.
Challenge
Slow and cumbersome processes for cash application, vendor payments and banks reconciliation
Prior to implementing Cashbook’s cash management solution, Portmeirion was struggling with:
- Slow bank reconciliation process as all done in Excel spreadsheets.
- Paper based remittances were manually printed and posted to vendors.
- Payment processes were cumbersome.
- Cash application was manual with no automated transactions.
- No banking integration for foreign payments.
- Lack of visibility of funds across Europe.
Solution
The Cashbook cash management solution created a bank journal for reconciliation purposes and a cash journal for applying cash against open accounts receivable and accounts payable invoices. By importing all of the customer information, Portmeirion were able to immediately begin cash application and in some cases have the cash automatically coded to specific general ledger codes for handling bank charges and sweeps.
For payments, the key for Portmeirion was more flexibility. For their foreign payments, the Cashbook cash management solution was able to provide them with a Euro compliant payment file and for non-Euro payments a slightly different payment format was implemented.
Full Bank & ERP Integration
Automated processing, regardless of country, ERP or bank
- Standard payment process no matter what bank, currency or ERP used.
- Full and seamless integration with their existing ERP.
- Greater banking integration to speed up processing.
More Advanced Intelligence
Powering an unprecedented level of automation; massively reducing manual entry
- Replaced LX ACP600, ACP620, ACP650 with Cashbook Global Payments.
- Easy to de-select invoices, vendors and companies prior to payments being completed.
- Central payment process replaced multiple heterogonous methods in different countries for payroll and vendor payments.
- Automatic email remittance solution has reduced time and costs of payment processes.
- >75% bank automation and reconciliation match rates.
Greater Financial Control
Clear audit trails and SEPA compliant
- Complete audit trail and SEPA compliant including XML/XSL reports.
- Bank statements automatically uploaded.
- Matching algorithms in place to automatically close invoices.
I would recommend them highly to other companies using BPCS or LX.
We found out about the Cashbook cash management solution through our ERP vendors Infor. They recommended we take a look at their project to extend the capabilities of LX in terms of banking integration. The people at Cashbook were very helpful in getting us live on LX v8.3.4 and I am delighted to say they kept exactly to their budget.
