FISCAL Case Studies.

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Aberdeen City Council: Case Study

Find out how Aberdeen City Council’s Accounts Payable department prevented £500,000 of loss and became an award winning team. The Council’s initiative was to reduce duplicate invoices, delayed payments and fraud risk within finance, and was successfully achieved when FISCAL’s solution was implemented.

Introduction

Aberdeen City Council’s AP team processes more than 225,000 invoices a year from thousands of suppliers through Cedar e-Financials using OCR and E-invoicing systems. Although already a dynamic team with strong leadership, defined procedures and integrated automation technologies, it still wanted a tool that helped reduce payment errors and risk while freeing up time to fine-tune other AP processes.

Aberdeen City Council logo with a black and white photo background of people in a discussion
“It is one of our most valuable tools in delivering a best-in-class service for our suppliers.”
Details

The Council’s AP team had three main issues it needed to solve:

  • A high number of orders were being placed that circumvented the well-defined corporate procedure of the Council’s centralised procurement team.
  • Council staff were not always diligent with goods receipting orders or authorising invoices, leading to downstream difficulties for the AP team, such as mismatched invoices that delayed payments to suppliers.
  • Being part of the National Fraud Initiative (NFI) required several AP staff members to manage data extracts and uploads as well as trawl through reports. With up to two years between data uploads, by the time any problems were identified by the NFI and communicated to Aberdeen City Council, it was often too late to rectify them.
Solution

In 2004, the Council’s then Head of Finance decided to trial FISCALs solution and was very pleased with the results. He said: “We found it a very clever piece of software and we were immediately impressed.” Following a successful 30-day trial, the Council implemented our software as a preventative measure. As a result, they have regularly renewed the licence to ensure continuity of the protection it offers in terms of greater preventative controls and increased visibility into transactions. They continue to derive real, bottom-line value from the software. In 2011, the team added the Constant Monitoring module, allowing them to set up automatic, regular reviews on all transactions. This gave the team a greater measure of control and insight than ever before. The AP team also started using the Master Supplier module to audit their file of 60,000 records, which had never previously been cleansed. Interrogating the supplier records beginning with “A”, identified more than 200 suppliers with incorrect or out-of-date information. The team has since used the module to further streamline and improve its Master Supplier File of several thousand records.

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