Upper Grand District School Board, in Southwest Ontario, supports over 34,000 students and across more than 70 schools in the Counties of Wellington and Duffering. With so many facilities, the district school board has a LOT of utility bills to manage - nearly 400 each month.
Beyond the effort involved in manually processing and paying these paper-based utility bills, the district school board’s process for monitoring utility usage meant a heavy reliance on finance to provide usage date, tied to the original printed statements.
According to Application Development Manager Roger Yang, “We monitor all usage for water, electricity and gas usage in a school every month. In the past, that meant asking finance for the data, which often came from the original paper bill, which was a labor-intensive and time consuming process.”
Taking the Pain Out of AP Processes and Usage Analysis
The Upper Grand District School Board decided to implement the docAlpha Digital Transformation platform to handle its utility bill payment process and digitize its utility bills and related usage information in a way that reduce the time and effort for the district’s accounts payable team.
With docAlpha, the district school board could rely on a system capable of automatically classifying documents, extracting relevant data and filing those documents automatically.
“We receive invoices in our mailbox, we process them through docAlpha, and then everything flows to DocLib,” Slavik explained. “With PO invoices DocLib gets the information from QAD. With non-PO, we have a list of approvers and DocLib takes care of forwarding the workload to whoever has to approve it. When it comes back to us, we validate all the information and just hit a button to flow everything into QAD so it’s ready to be paid.
On average, 20% of the time/effort required just to scan and file utility bills was eliminated through automation, with the added bonus of instant access to usage data.
To learn more about how docAlpha allowed Upper Grand District School Board to centralize operations and gain control over accounts payable, read the full case study.