AnyDoc INVOICE Helps Northeast Utilities Conserve Energy When Processing Invoices

If you've ever gone without electricity because of a storm or downed power line, you know firsthand how important it is for your utility company to run like a well-oiled machine. And as we've seen in some of the more recent disasters that have dotted the world's landscape, the efficiency of a utility service provider's operations could even mean the difference between life and death. Northeast Utilities Service Company (NU) takes that responsibility very seriously. As the provider of energy products and services for more than two million businesses and residences in the Northeastern U.S., it is always on the prowl to find ways to streamline its operations and maximize its efforts.

Carrying responsibility for six electric and two natural gas companies, the Berlin, Conn.-based Fortune 500 conglomerate found itself expending too much of its own energy processing the 300,000 invoices it receives annually from its many vendors—half of which are paper. They estimated that 98 percent of their processing costs came from labor alone. Out of a staff of 21 in the Accounts Payable (A/P) department, 10 were dedicated to keying data from invoices, and there were imminent plans to hire five more to accommodate the growth they were experiencing.

Contributing to their mushrooming processing costs was NU's labor-intensive manual data entry process. In addition to the cost of manually keying information from their incoming invoices, they were absorbing the significant cost associated with paper shuffling as their invoices passed from one hand to another.

Not only was their A/P paper workflow expensive, it was also slow and could prove unwieldy during peak times. After each invoice was opened in the mailroom, it had to be sorted by type, bundled into groups of 25, routed to a data entry clerk, matched to the purchase order (if there was one), manually keyed in, assigned a barcode separator page, scanned, funneled to their backend system and then filed.