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Our Accounting Manager at XALT faced a daily mountain of challenges with our inefficient and largely manual invoice management.
Just imagine: A pile of paper invoices on your desk, each one has to be scanned individually, entered correctly in the system (in our case in Jira), described by hand and assigned to a processor. At the same time, the phone is constantly ringing, colleagues are asking about the invoice status due to a lack of transparency, suppliers are waiting for payments and the management urgently needs financial reports.
The consequences: Invoices often remain unprocessed, errors creep in due to manual processes, responsibilities are not transparent and valuable time is wasted searching for documents. This leads to delayed payments, disgruntled suppliers, reduced productivity and increasing frustration within the team.
Our goal was clear: We needed a digital solution for fast invoice allocation, improved traceability and remote access to minimize manual effort and unnecessary internal communication. We wanted to increase efficiency, eliminate paper and allow our team to focus on value-adding activities.
A key aspect of our solution was the decision to use our existing ticket system Jira. On the one hand, all employees were already familiar with the system. Secondly, Jira offers the technical possibilities to create transparency regarding processing status and responsibilities and to ensure simple documentation of the entire processing procedure, from entry to completion.
At XALT, but especially in our Operations & Accounting team, there were several challenges in digital invoice management:
The process was slow and cumbersome, which led to delays. Each step required manual effort: scanning the document, sending it to the person responsible, creating a ticket in Jira including the title and description of the document and assigning the person responsible.
It was difficult to track the status and the processor of a document. You often had to ask what the status of an invoice was, for example, or whether it had already been paid.
Team members from other office locations needed access to documents, but a lack of remote access limited their flexibility and productivity.
The system was poorly structured, which made it difficult to find important documents quickly, delayed decision-making processes and thus slowed down those responsible in the execution of their tasks.
The space required by paper documents has increased considerably over the years and, as a digital company, XALT wanted to do without paper wherever possible.
All of these issues led to significant inefficiencies in invoice management and operational processes. The workflow was hampered by delays, errors and a lack of structured processes.
We tackled these challenges by implementing a robust solution in which the manual process was digitized and automated as far as possible. To do this, we needed a scanner with an Internet or cloud connection (e.g. Google Drive, Microsoft OneDrive, Dropbox or similar), which was integrated with the cloud and Jira as a process digitization solution.
A scanner has been set up in each office, which is connected to our cloud storage to store scanned documents there. A script located in our source code storage Bitbucket is automatically executed every 5 minutes to scan our cloud storage for new files. When a new file is found, a Jira ticket is automatically created containing the document summary (title) and the scanned file. The person responsible is automatically assigned to the ticket and a notification is sent to them. The entire editing process of the document is tracked in Jira, which ensures that everything remains transparent and traceable.
To ensure a smooth rollout, XALT communicated the implementation plan and its benefits to all employees involved, including the accounting and legal departments.
Training courses were also held to familiarize our employees with the new system, backed up by ongoing support to resolve any problems.
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The digital invoice management process became significantly more efficient and led to several positive results:
Overall, the implementation led to a significant increase in operational efficiency and productivity as well as the elimination of previous problems.
In conclusion, the invoice management digitization solution implemented by XALT was not only of great benefit to our accounting team. We quickly realized that this approach could be used just as effectively for other departments that need to manage a large volume of documents. In particular, our legal team, which works with a large number of contracts, compliance documents and legal documents on a daily basis, could benefit from a similar implementation.
The basic principles of our solution - automated document capture, centralized digital storage, improved traceability and increased transparency - can be easily adapted to the specific needs of different teams. Whether it's invoices, contracts or other important business documents, the digitized workflow enables a more efficient way of working, reduces manual errors and improves collaboration across departmental boundaries.
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