The recipe for  simplifying AP with smeg UK and stratas   

“We now have a very efficient and transparent system to allow us to process and pay purchase invoices.”

Jane Marah, Assistant Accountant, SMEG UK Ltd

About SMEG UK Ltd:

Passionately family-owned and run for three generations, Smeg operates across three key divisions. Well known domestically for home appliances, the company also operates in professional business sectors such as the food service, catering and hospitality industry Smeg Foodservice and in the laboratory, dental and medical equipment sectors Smeg Instruments. 

Style, for Smeg, is a distinct concept: it is the way a product communicates with its surroundings and how we as users interact with it.  At Smeg, true to their Italian upbringing, they believe the kitchen is very much the heart of the home; a place where family & friends congregate and enjoy good food. Taking centre stage, Smeg appliances play an integral role, often stand-out focal points in the kitchen.

Challenges faced before working with Stratas

SMEG UK had a few challenges before implementing Accounts Payable automation with Stratas. This included things such as invoices taking a long time to be processed, or getting lost around the business when being moved from desk to desk, duplication of effort in processing invoices and storage space being required to file and archive physical documents.

This impacted the business negatively as urgent invoices were difficult to get approved especially when paper copies needed to be signed off by people on different sites. Also, delegation across nominal codes meant slower processing times resulting in suppliers chasing for payment more frequently.

Why did SMEG UK choose Stratas?

“The system allowed us the flexibility to build and manage our own approval flows, that are tailored to our business, it’s not just an off-the-shelf standard system.”

“We also needed a system that integrated with Sage X3 which Stratas was able to do.”

Jane Marah, Assistant Accountant, SMEG UK Ltd

The results: 

Since implementing Accounts Payable automation with Stratas SMEG has been able to multi-code transport invoices across different departments. They built rules into the system to ensure that the invoices flow quickly and efficiently throughout the business with full visibility of where they are at any given time, to finally be approved by the relevant managers.

“It’s made the management of accounts at month end a lot easier to calculate as we can see clearly what invoices need to be accrued.”

Jane Marah, Assistant Accountant, SMEG UK Ltd

By taking away the time spent on manually intensive work SMEG has seen remarkable time savings allowing them to spend more time on value-added tasks.

“It has reduced the time spent on inputting and chasing approval significantly, meaning we can spend more time ensuring invoices are ready for payment on time and accounts are allocated correctly.”

Jane Marah, Assistant Accountant, SMEG UK Ltd

Other comments:

“The management accounts information has been more beneficial to us than we expected when we started this journey. Being able to download a report at month and year-end has improved the accuracy of the detail we can provide. We have been really happy with Stratas as a customer. Stratas was brilliant at helping us understand what we needed from the system and design it around that. “

Jane Marah, Assistant Accountant, SMEG UK Ltd

Ratings:

How would you rate the implementation process?

10 / 10

How would you rate your AP automation solution?

10 / 10

How likely are you to recommend Stratas?

10 / 10 – Extremely Likely 

Would you like to find out more about how Accounts Payable automation could be a good fit for your business? Get in touch.