Established in London in 1989 and still going strong today, De Groot Property likes to say “If Rolls Royce was a property manager, it would probably be us”. Few companies can say they have been successfully operating for 30 years, something the team are incredibly proud of. Their recipe for success? A tight-knit team that focuses on building authentic one-to-one relationships with every owner and making sure communication is transparent and authentic.
The challenge for De Groot Property was simple yet tedious, processing invoices is a slow and laborious job that takes time away from more important, high-level business motions of the accounts team.
De Groot Properties' designated bookkeeper comes into the office one day per week to look after the financial admin of their portfolio yet spends 30% of her time trudging through backlogs of invoices.
Having a solution that speeds up the invoice processing workflow would free up time for De Groot Property’s bookkeeper to spend on more important bottom-line activities or allow them to reclaim some of the costs of her time.
Our bookkeeper comes in one day per week and It’s safe to say she spends 3 hours a day uploading invoices. So if we look at that collectively, one of her four days per month at work is spent processing invoices.
What did take me 2-3 minutes is now taking me 20 seconds. Times that by 50 invoices and it's easy to see the ROI on time saved."
This was not De Groot Property’s first rodeo with OCR technology, after using Hubdoc as a way to upload invoices into Xero they found that not all the information contained on the documents was being imported. This meant although part of the process was automatic there was still manual entry required.
“With Hubdoc a lot of the time it won’t scan in exactly what the invoice is for, so you have to go back and type in the invoice descriptions” says Daniel
With little to no learning curve, the team were able to adopt Re-leased Invoice Intelligence from the moment they implemented it.
It’s simple, it does exactly what it’s supposed to do and everything's in the right place.”
As easy as With Invoice Intelligence De Groot can now scan in invoices and, with “at least 90% accuracy”, remove the majority of the invoice processing workflow. Now all they must do is upload the invoice then either approve or decline in Re-leased, then move on to the next one.
Literally all I have to do is select the company, select the property and that's it. It's all done. Then I just press next. It would have previously taken me to do 2-3 minutes to process that by manually typing data points. Now I am taking 20 seconds.
Using Invoice Intelligence De Groot has reduced their bookkeeper's workload by 25%, freeing up time to be spent on more important business objectives or reducing the time their bookkeeper comes into the office which saves ¼ salary costs that can go back into revenue.
50 invoices sometimes could have taken 3-4 hours. She has done that in an hour. Over the course of a month that is an entire day saved. So instead of coming in four times a month she now only has to come in 3. In terms of time and cost-saving tools, this is the biggest.