How Accounting Automation Saved Over 30 Hours for Irish Accounting firm

The Client

A well-reputed Irish accounting firm has been helping the SME sector with outsourced back-office Audit, Payroll, and Taxation Services for the last 40 years.

Their niche is around professional advisory and services.

The Challenge

The irish accounting firm had large number of customer in FMCG sector, these customers operates multiple stores in Ireland.

The client recognized a significant inefficiency in managing supplier bills and credit notes sent to FMCG Stores, their Accounts Payable software doesn’t have any ability sync bills and credit notes to accounting software. There was a gap when it came to handling the bills and credit notes from suppliers.

Key pain points:

• Bills and credit notes were primarily sent in PDF format, making it difficult to copy and paste data.
• A few suppliers provided bills and credit notes in CSV format, but the majority did not.
• The current process involved manually uploading these documents as an attachment to Xero for each client, leading to significant time spent on repetitive tasks.

Key challenges:

• Management of bills over scattered emails or FTP or Dropbox
• Manually upload each PDF to Xero.
• Switching between each client’s Xero account for maintaining data.
• Data may get missed or typo errors

The Solution

After understanding the problem our team proposed to develop a custom web application that addresses the key challenges.

• Multi-organization management: The ability to manage multiple client Xero organizations, Role based permission management, and assign limited companies to each user (accountant)
• Dropbox integration: A shared Dropbox folder for each client that allows the end clients to directly upload PDF or CSV files. This eliminated the need to manage scattered emails or FTP accounts.
• Automated data extraction: Once new files were uploaded to the Dropbox folder, a background service automatically extracted the supplier details and bill line items from the PDF/CSV files and automatically pushed the data directly into the respective client’s Xero account.

Results

• 2 hours saved Per end client organization for staff (our direct client’s accounting staff)
• A total of 30 Monthly Hours are saved for 15 organizations. Hours will only multiply as more organizations are put into an automatic process.
• Increase profit margin to 34% for the same bookkeeping service which was being handled by staff manually.
• The process became fully automated. Accurate bills and credit note entry gets done almost within 10 minutes from upload to Dropbox. Errors and Duplications were reduced to 0.
• Pruned Dependency

By implementing this custom Xero integration, the accounting firm not only saved valuable time and reduced manual data entry errors, but also increased the profitability of their bookkeeping services. The process of managing supplier bills and credit notes became fully automated, making the entire workflow more efficient and reliable.

Platform/Technology

• Framework: Microsoft Asp.net Core MVC and API v 2.1 hosted on Azure Cloud App Service
• Background service: Bills and credit notes were uploaded via a Windows Service.
• Programming language: C#

By implementing this custom Xero integration, the accounting firm not only saved valuable time and reduced manual data entry errors, but also increased the profitability of their bookkeeping services. The process of managing supplier bills and credit notes became fully automated, making the entire workflow more efficient and reliable.

Need Custom Accounting Automation? Contact Us!

If your business faces similar challenges in managing supplier bills, invoices, or any other accounting processes, we can help. Contact us to learn more about our custom Xero integration solutions and how we can streamline your business operations.