Vincere Bill & Self Invoice integration with Xero

The Client

The Client provides FMCG, Food Manufacturing & Pharmaceutical recruitment services in the UK with 50 years of combined experience. And also, helping blue chips and SMEs for future growth and gain an advantage on their competitors.

The Challenge

The client serves in a recruitment & consulting domain. They have more than 40 recruiters and they wanted self invoices and timesheet PDFs of the recruiter to be automatically synced to Xero. To do this we required an API from Vincere, but during the process we found that the API of Vincere is not yet developed and it will take each month a few hundred GBPs as fees to use the API. But there was no time for waiting as they wanted this integration a month back. So the key challenge for the Satva team is to identify a solution that works without an API and something which is reliable and fast.

Their CFO wanted to sync bill & invoice attachments to Xero frequently on a multiple count & required a lot of manual effort to upload bill attachments to Xero.

Also, the client wanted to avoid manual bill & invoice entries to Xero to save their cost of bookkeeping and rather invest in his business marketing. So, the CFO was looking for a complete accounting solution to manage her bills & invoices in Xero.

Key challenges:

• Manually uploading each recruiter’s self-billed invoice and timesheet takes a lot of time for the finance team.
• The billing process repeats every week, so there is too much labor involved in doing it manually.
• Retrieve vendor bills and recruiter’s self-billed invoices without API

The Solution

After understanding the problem, our team proposed to create a robust accounting via email integration which solves the problem. This would facilitate the client to manage multiple vendors’ data at once and sync the bills & recruiter’s invoices to Xero and process the approvals from Xero. So after careful analysis, we found that there is a way where we can auto CC/BCC all emails to a designated programmatic email inbox. Then, the system would automatically bring the latest unread emails along with attachments and find those records using a unique reference number in Xero. Once a bill is found, the system will upload all the attachments from the email to Xero. The client’s accountant can approve those bills and ensure that all the proof of bills are attached to the Xero bill record.

Results

• We saved a few thousand GBPs for clients as an upfront cost and for recurring we saved more than ~100 GBP per month.
• 4 hours are saved weekly for accounting staff.
• The process became fully automated. Accurate invoice entry gets done almost within 10 minutes. Errors and Duplications were reduced to 0.
• Pruned Dependency.

Platform/Technology

• .Net Core
• SQL Database
• Azure Service bus, Azure Function, Blob storage
• Xero (Bill & Supplier attachment sync)