About the Community Food Bank of Eastern Oklahoma
The Community Food Bank of Eastern Oklahoma provides millions of pounds of food each year through non-profit partners and agencies to people in need throughout 24 counties in eastern Oklahoma. Through corporate and retail store donations, community support, food drives and US government commodities, the organization maintains this level of support. They also purchase non-perishable goods and produce to ensure the recipients they aid are receiving proper nutrition.
David Parrack is the CFO and has one Staff Accountant on his team. The two of them manage all the finances so it was even more crucial that they use technology to maximize their efficiencies where possible. Previous to MineralTree, the Staff Accountant was managing accounts payable and accounts receivables. She was manually entering bills into the ERP and following up on lost bills and managing incoming vendor calls. Approvals were done manually on printed copies of invoices. With MineralTree, all of the manual processing has been removed from the Staff Accountant. Now David can quickly review invoices in the system, route for approvals and schedule the payments.
The Challenge: Reduce manual processes to improve accuracies and reallocate resources to value-added activities
When it came to their ERP, Community Food Bank of Eastern Oklahoma had recently migrated from QuickBooks to Intacct for the added functionality they required. They also wanted a cloud-based solution designed for multiple users and delivering dashboarding capabilities that they really needed to gain better visibility into financial data.
Choosing Intacct gave them the functionality they needed from an ERP but it still did not solve all of their accounts payable challenges as it did not seamlessly provide the routing, approval, and centralized payment options that they were seeking.
Armed with an ERP to meet the needs of the business, they now needed to focus on a solution that would reduce the manual processes that were consuming resources. One area that they recognized could be impacted was accounts payable. With the intent to move towards paperless AP, streamline approval processes and have visibility into true cash flow, they sought a solution.
The Solution: MineralTree automates the entire process and ensures the complete end-to-end workflow is followed
There were a number of reasons the organization wanted to implement MineralTree to automate accounts payable. There was an intense reliance on resources to manually process invoices, make payments and capture approvals. Invoices were sometimes lost since there was no systemic workflow being adhered to which also resulted in the organization being at risk of understating payables at any point in time.
Evaluating four accounts payable automation solutions, they decided on MineralTree for the true out-of-thebox integration with Intacct. They also knew that once they made their decision, they needed a quick implementation and MineralTree was able to deliver. Adding the ability to make vendor payments by check, ACH, credit card or virtual card sealed the deal.
The Benefits: Payment automation, paperless process, approval management
“As the CFO of a lean team, I needed to ensure my time was not being spent on manual tasks while empowering my team to focus on value-added activities,” David Parrack, CFO, Community Food Bank of Eastern Oklahoma. “With MineralTree, we can now easily manage accounts payable by auto-routing approvals, scheduling payments ahead of time and supporting our mission to go paperless. And it’s all synced with our Intacct ERP.”
The timesaving The Community Food Bank of Eastern Oklahoma experienced by automating their accounts payable workflow was what they needed to support the reallocation of resources to accounts receivable activities (managing money coming into the organization). Removing the need to chase approvals, manage paper invoices and manually search for payment status for vendor inquiries was exactly what they needed.
The Bottom Line: Why Choose MineralTree Invoice-to-Pay?
MineralTree delivers an end-to-end accounts payable automation solution fully integrated with Intacct. Multi-tiered approval workflows automatically triggered based on pre-defined workflows makes invoice and payment approvals easy to manage and capture. As volume grows, MineralTree together with Intacct will allow the Community Food Bank of Eastern Oklahoma finance team to manage everyday tasks while focusing on value add activities.
“Accounts payable management is extremely easy now that we have MineralTree. Manual invoice entry is gone and we no longer have to chase approvers down in order to get payments out on time,” David Parrack, CFO, Community Food Bank of Eastern Oklahoma.
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