P. Clarke & Sons Ltd

Why Adest?

“All our staff quickly become familiar to the quick and easy system of scanning, indexing and retrieval, it is extremely user friendly and Management in particular are seeing the benefits of the system as they have instant access to documents from their desks. It has been the one investment made that appears to have done exactly what it set out to do. Save Time, Save Cost, Save Space”.
Catherine Moore, Group Accountant

Overview

P. Clarke and Sons Ltd, have evolved over the last seventy years and apart from the Head Office in Co Fermanagh, offices are now located in all areas of Ireland and recently a new office has been set up in UK. Continued growth has kept the company at the forefront of the construction, quarrying and engineering industries, and due to their ever increasing success, the volumes of paperwork created has grown proportionately.

P. Clarke and Sons Ltd have in the region of 30 different contracts running at any given time and processing over 2,500 invoices per month. Although they are all received centrally, all invoices must be passed to the relevant Quantity Surveyor or Site Foreman for approval.

Whilst P. Clarke’s previous filing method worked, it was a manual process and therefore time consuming and inefficient. All inbound invoices had to be copied and either posted or faxed to the relevant office, incurring unnecessary time and costs. This was further hampered by the fact that roughly 20% of all documents sent to site were requested again, due to the fact that the original copies had been lost or mislaid. Additionally, many duplicate invoices were required when final accounts were being prepared. Paperwork was being filed, retrieved and re¬filed several times each month.

Having looked at various options, Clarke’s decided to choose Adest. This decision was based on the simplicity and user-friendliness of Adest and the ease with which it seamlessly integrated with their existing financial software, 5th Generation.

Implementation

The Adest system was designed to accommodate the scanning, indexing and retrieval of all documentation and electronic files. All documents are now been processed electronically once they are received centrally, all invoices are scanned into a batch in Adest for filing or indexing. Their accounts department automatically creates a unique number and this is used as a means for filing the documents. This number automatically pulls across all the relevant indexing criteria, hence saving on duplication of entry or documents.

Once all invoices are indexed, the user now has the ability to search for information by a variety of different means. All invoices related to a specific project number can be grouped together and emailed or faxed directly to the relevant site office for approval, directly from Adest, eliminating the time spend photocopying, sorting and forwarding the invoices.

As the invoices are approved it gives immediate visibility to the accounts personnel of the status of any invoice, in relation to any project at any given time eliminating the need for additional copying and forwarding due to mislaid invoices, as all scanned images will be available to the user for instant faxing or emailing. A user can, for example, easily search for all approved invoices received that day/week/month, from a particular site office. Once files have been retrieved they can be viewed on screen, printed, faxed or e¬mailed.

Benefits

• Productivity/Time savings
• By implementing Adest ALL invoices are captured into the solution. As a result, the number of steps in existing processes have been substantially reduced.
• Cost Savings.
• Savings are already becoming apparent, e.g office equipment (photocopiers etc) and employees time etc.
• Customer Service Productivity.
• Staff members are now empowered to instantaneously handle queries and requests for copies of invoices and deliver them directly from their desktop, eliminating the need to go to a filing cabinet and manually retrieve, print, post or fax a document.