Leading destination management company in Sri Lanka
The Client
Our client is a Sri Lankan owned and operated destination management company with a track record of 45 years. They have partnerships with leading international brands such as Kouni, Thomas Cook and Virgin and is a market leader in inbound travels. It also manages the brand “Nature Odyssey”, which caters to nature and adventure travel.
Objectives
- Migrate process to allow the full accounts payable division to be redeployed
- Reduce payment cycle times
- Resolve long outstanding supplier disputes and complaints
- Track supplier queries throughout a multi-step process, involving disputes, returned invoices and non-compliant invoices
Scope
- Setup a mailroom for receipt and handling of 8,000 supplier invoices monthly
- Carry out VAT compliance checks, scanning and filing
- Invoice processing
- Quality checks on invoices processed and transfer of payables to SAP
- Automatic payment run in SAP based on credit terms and submit payment proposal for
- client approval
- Upload of approved payments to online banking interface
- Operate a supplier helpdesk for handling supplier inquiries
- Supplier reconciliations
Business Benefits & Outcome
- Redeployed the entire Accounts payable division which included a manager and a team of 12
- Resolution of long outstanding amounts and disputes
- Ability to negotiate better rates with suppliers owing to payment record and secured the reputation as the best paymaster in the industry
- Detailed MIS with statistics on the number of escalations, analysed under query types, which improved understanding of the end-to-end process and highlighted bottle necks
- Several IT innovations that reduced manual steps
- Integration of document imaging to SAP making it possible for images of invoices to be accessed from the ERP for payment approval
- Introduction of Payment Group based automatic payment runs with pre-defined payment dates
- Supplier Education on VAT guidelines
- Assigning of KPIs and targets to operations personnel to reduce discrepancies
- Fully complete and audit VAT files, saving millions in disallowed input VAT claims
Partnered with inhouse software development company to implement the country’s first ever supplier portal, “Suppliermate”, which enables suppliers to upload electronic invoices, directly correspond with operational staff on disputes and monitor payments on mobile and web
