Located in the corporate office, the Charles E. Smith Realty Companies&singlequot; Accounts Payable department handles and processes invoices and payments for all residential, commercial and retail properties. With volume of more than 1 million pages per year, Smith was handling too mcuh paper during the invoice payment process. The entire payment cycle had become inefficient and lengthy. As a result, both vendors and internal customers were frustrated by delayed payments. Lost documents resulted in Accounts Payable personnel spending a large portion of time researching questions and searching for missing invoices.

Smith Realty wanted to replace its manual process of routing paper invoices for coding and approval. The installation of a new document management system would address two significant areas: improved customer service and a proactive approach to cost reductions. Improving the workflow would speed the process and allow the company to take advantage of vendor discounts based on early payment of invoices.

The Gauss VIP software platform automated the process of capturing the invoice by scanning the documents. From then on, file information would be attached to the document in their electronic forms to reduce manual errors and make it ideal for archiving at the completion of the transation. Once in the system, the process was definied to cnsistently enforce the company business rules.