- Women’s Pioneer Housing Association improves budgetary control and saves time on processing invoices using Invu’s Purchase Order Processing software - 

Women’s Pioneer Housing, a provider of homes and services that offer a springboard to independent women, has reimagined its purchase order and invoice processing system and gained renewed control over their spending.

Using Invu Purchasing, a purchase ordering software from Invu, Women’s Pioneer Housing has significantly improved the level of control exercised over business expenditure and the ability to process supplier invoices on time.

In addition to improving their budgetary control, Women’s Pioneer Housing has also reduced duplication of work and has seen increased employee productivity. Due to this enhanced visibility, they are now reaping the rewards they can achieve with the efficiency savings.

Before implementing Invu Purchasing, Women’s Pioneer Housing’s original process for raising and managing purchase orders was extremely time-consuming and inefficient for the finance staff, who would manually process over 6,000 invoices a year.  

Women’s Pioneer Housing recognised the importance of exercising control at the point of making a purchase commitment rather than at the point that a supplier invoice is received. This made it vital to find a solution that streamlined their requisition process and freed the finance team to focus on other areas of the business.

Atrik Gadoya, Finance Manager at Women’s Pioneer Housing, explained,

“In the time it used to take to register 10 invoices, the new system can cope with registering 100! The system reads the level of budget available and informs the officers how much they’ve committed, how much spend they have left and allows managers to make more informed judgements.”

Mark Cole, Director of Resources at Women’s Pioneer Housing, highlighted,

 “The Chief Executive and Senior Staff were supportive of the system because of the enhanced budgetary control. We also saw the benefits they could achieve with the cost savings.”

Women’s Pioneer Housing aren’t alone in using manual and slow invoice processes. This has proven to be the case for many businesses, as shown in an independent research project with the majority (85%) of businesses still printing out their invoices even if they have been received digitally. 

Ian Smith, GM and Finance Director at Invu, said: 

“Women’s Pioneer Housing, along with many other businesses, need improved visibility of where the invoice sits in the process, better control over approval processes to ensure invoices are consistently sent to the right people for approval, and identity management, to make certain that the person signing it off is authorised to do so. Particularly as more and more finance teams are working remotely from home, increasing the risk of fraud and error. ”

Finance departments across the UK are ready to embrace automated accounting processes. Research has shown that 44% of finance workers think that automating processes would make them more productive, with one in five (22%) claiming they would welcome automation in their business.

Smith concludes, “With Invu, those responsible for expenditure budgets can be certain that they have control over what is charged to their budgets as it is approved only by themselves or their chosen delegates.”