Wrexham County Borough Council transforms Accounts Payable and drives down invoicing costs with Proactis

Proactis, the global spend management company, today announced that Wrexham County Borough Council has extended its Proactis Purchase-to-Pay solution to include the hybrid model of the Proactis Invoice Capture service, transforming Accounts Payable and automating the end-to-end process to improve controls and reduce costs.

The Council, a local government borough in northeast Wales, previously relied on disparate, legacy eInvoicing solutions where processes were manually intensive, with invoices often received across departments and limited central visibility and control. It receives over 60,000 purchase invoices per annum as paper invoices or emailed in PDF format.

By leveraging its existing Proactis Purchase-to-Pay solution to include the hybrid model of the Invoice Capture Managed Service, these invoices are easily scanned and imported, with the subsequent images appearing through the managed service. Key invoice information is then extracted and a dedicated query desk process is provided for non-compliant invoices. The process turns paper and PDF documents into electronic invoices for further downstream processing. This in turn reduces the need for Council staff to manually enter key invoice values and provides an electronic means to rapidly resolve non-compliance of invoices, with the ability to actively engage suppliers in the resolution process. This eliminates wasted time, money and talent across the end-to-end Purchase-to-Pay and AP process.  

Jayne Jones, Creditors Manager at Wrexham County Borough commented: “The Proactis service substantially improves our invoice processing efficiency, enabling staff to focus on more value-add projects.”

“We received many invoices that were not compliant, such as missing or invalid values, and dealing with these used to be a time-consuming process. We now work closely with our suppliers to reduce the number of non-compliant invoices. The dedicated query desk means that all non-compliant invoices can be handled in a more structured and controlled way, and allows immediate access to each invoice as we need it. This is resulting in benefits for both suppliers and the council” added Jones. 

Wrexham County Borough Council is the latest customer to extend its solution to drive down invoicing costs and free up valuable staff time. Proactis already supports leading Councils such as Wigan Council, Essex County Council, Flintshire County Council, Denbighshire County Council and Nuneaton and Bedworth Council.