Published by Fidesic on
Let's Cut Invoice Processing Time in Half!
MB2 Dental Solutions is a Multi-Entity Company that Cut Invoice Processing Time in Half with AP Automation for Microsoft Dynamics GP.
In this article we will look at the story of one company that is growing at a staggering pace. We will see how they were able to automate central Accounts Payable while keeping their overhead low and enabling remote locations to process invoices without requiring additional ERP licenses.
The MB2 Dental Story
MB2 Dental Solutions is a fast-growing dental management and practice development company. They provide services to MB2 members that allow dental practices to focus on their core mission of delivering care while spending less time focused on daily office management tasks. MB2 provides back office assistance to dental offices, delivering the benefits of partnering with a larger organization while the individual practices maintain their independence. MB2 partners have the advantage of centralized services to incorporate best practices, improve profitability and grow their own brand.
Part 1: Outgrowing Quickbooks and Bill.com
As they were growing, MB2 needed a way to process thousands of monthly invoices without adding additional overhead. Initially growing from 80 to 250 locations, they were using QuickBooks as their accounting solution and Bill.com for accounts payable, but the company would soon double the number of locations again. As they grew, they needed to keep their AP team lean so they could focus their staffing dollars on more strategic roles but their out-scaled systems were not able to keep up.
“We found that QuickBooks will only go so far before we would break it, even with just 80 entities,” said MB2 Controller Sarah Sawyer. “Each entity was its own company and running a report across all of them, QuickBooks would frequently crash. With Bill.com, we had to go in and sync everything individually to each company instead of doing one large sync.”
System time-outs, lost invoices, sluggish approvals, duplications and lack of traceability were plaguing the organization, especially at month-end. They had plans to sustain their rapid growth trajectory, so their systems had to be updated.
“QuickBooks just could not handle what we were doing,” Sawyer said. “We’d run a report and it would take three hours just to run through all the files, and that’s if it didn’t error out in the middle. There were some very late nights of working with Quickbooks not playing nicely with others.”
Part 2: Moving to Microsoft Dynamics GP
MB2 knew they needed to upgrade off of QuickBooks entry-level accounting. They made the switch to Dynamics GP which solved many of their woes, but Accounts Payable was still struggling.
“We tried taking Bill.com over to GP but unfortunately, they wanted us to download 4 files per entity to upload into GP. At minimum, that would have been 400+ files to be downloaded a day. That was definitely not going to work for us.”
To make matters worse, Bill.com changed their support service model so that MB2 was no longer able to get an account manager on the phone who knew their system, Sawyer said. Instead they were only able to get support through chat with a different person each time.
It was also becoming increasingly expensive because Bill.com was raising prices and lacked scalability, requiring an account fee for each MB2 company and a separate user license for each account, even for the same user across accounts. It quickly became clear to Sawyer that MB2 needed an AP automation solution built for Dynamics GP.
“Any extra work or manual data entry between these systems was a non-starter for us,” said Sawyer.
Part 3: Finding the Right AP Automation
Hiring enough clerks to manage AP data input and invoice processing would have impeded growth, especially as they needed to focus their staffing dollars on more strategic roles to manage rapid growth.
The primary issue with which MB2 was struggling included invoice capture systems that were unable to meet their entity-based needs, approval workflows that weren’t able to rout by location or entity, immense growth that would make check fulfillment a full-time job and manual ACH processing that was proving to be untenable with unique accounts for hundreds of entities.
After researching available AP automation solutions in the Dynamics ERP channel, it became clear that Fidesic AP was the only solution to address all of these problems. They were also using Binary Stream Multi-Entity Management software. Fidesic integrates seamlessly with this MEM solution.
“Fidesic and MEM have brought us into the 21st century. With MEM and Fidesic super it’s fast,” said Sawyer. “The great thing about Binary Stream’s MEM is you can look at all your companies in one smart list, in one report. And then you can dig down into that if something doesn’t look right. Especially if I’m looking for an invoice that I know we’ve received but somehow wasn’t posted in the right entity, I can look across all entities and see where that invoice is. I can do a search.”
Part 4: Transitioning to a 21st Century Automated Approach
Fidesic was able to address each of their primary objectives in a unique way - all without changing how they utilize features built into GP and MEM. The easy-to-use features and functionality of the Fidesic platform ensured that MB2 Dental Solutions addressed their primary issues and had a smooth onboarding process.
“When you’re in growth mode, a lot of times you’re in panic mode, trying to get everything correct and get bills paid in time. Fidesic came in and really helped us with that,” said Sawyer.
- Integration to Dynamics GP and Binary Stream MEM
- Invoice Capture/OCR
- Fidesic OCR is able to recognize locations in two ways:
- Unique capture drop boxes to each address
- A fallback back system of Ship-To Address recognition. This means that more than 99% of invoices captured, are captured to the appropriate location/entity.
- Fidesic OCR is able to recognize locations in two ways:
- Invoice Approval
- In regards to location-based rules, Fidesic Workflow is designed with multi-entity management in mind. This means invoices are routed automatically to the correct entity approvers without any manual routing.
- Outsourced Check Fulfillment
- Fidesic is able to print and mail checks on behalf of all entities - different bank accounts for all entities. These checks have the signature of the formal approver printed on each individual check.
- ACH Payments
- Outsourced ACH - Direct ACH for all companies
- Beyond check processing, Fidesic offers direct ACH, which means ACH files will be automatically generated and delivered to MB2’s member banks.
- These ACH files are unique per entity and are delivered automatically.
“Fidesic literally saved our sanity. It is so much easier to use and integrates with our software,” said Sawyer. “It is web based and built on the Azure cloud so it can be used from anywhere, and we can give access to our member users who want to review their invoices and payments without emailing the AP department for help.”
Conclusion
Three weeks after MB2 decided to go with Fidesic, they were able to automatically capture invoice data, get electronic approval, and push that data directly into their Dynamics GP accounting system without any manual entry. Although the complete rollout was delayed due to COVID 19, MB2 was able to complete their rollout to all locations during the pandemic.
Since implementing Fidesic in 2020, MB2 has doubled in size to more than 500 locations without any significant increase in their AP overhead.
“Having implemented Fidesic, we have been able to trim our invoice processing from 10 days to 5 days,” said Sawyer. “The automatic coding of invoices in the system has really helped improve efficiency as well.”
Introducing Virtual AP Clerk™
How Will Maximize Accounts Payable Value?
