Member Article

One of country’s largest mental health trusts automates processing of 40,000 invoices per year

Avon and Wiltshire Mental Health Trust (AWP), one of the largest NHS trusts of its kind, has significantly streamlined its purchase-to-pay (P2P) processes with V1 document management software integrated into Unit4 Agresso’s finance system.

The Trust, providing large areas of the South West with mental health services and operating from more than 100 locations including prison units and hospital wings, previously relied on finance staff to manually input invoice data from the 40,000 supplier invoices received each year.

AWP has now implemented V1’s Capture and PDF Capture to automate the capture of invoice data from both paper and PDF invoices. This has cut the time-consuming manual capture of invoice data by up to 80 per cent and is enabling suppliers to be paid more efficiently.

As a result of implementing the V1 solution, managers, who are based across a wide geographical spread of sites, from Bath and North East Somerset, to Bristol, North Somerset, South Gloucestershire, Swindon and Wiltshire, will benefit from improved day to day management of the finance function.

Andrew Russell, Payments Group Leader for AWP, said: “Before purchasing the V1 software, my team was processing invoices manually. With around 40,000 invoices a year it was particularly time consuming for staff, whereas now we have a far more automated P2P process. This is providing major cost benefits in terms of saved man hours.

“We chose V1’s software because, being existing users of the company’s BACS payment system, we’d always been happy with the software and the support offered. Having gone through a competitive tending process with three other software providers, we decided that V1 was the right choice for us and the best fit with our Unit4 Agresso finance system.”

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by V1 .