From paper shufflers to financial strategists
How Suburban Orthopaedics freed up 20 hours a week by ditching manual invoice handling
Tim Long, CFO at Suburban Orthopaedics, was drowning in paper. Doctors seeing patients all day couldn’t stop to sign invoices. Multiple offices made shuffling paper impossible. The growing healthcare provider needed something better, fast. Their AP specialist was spending 40 hours weekly on manual processes. Then everything changed.
INTERNAL/EXTERNAL DISCUSSIONS
Streamlined messaging saves unnecessary emails
“The messaging feature within Stampli has made things a lot easier. It’s consolidated all messaging within the platform. Best example would be with an invoice I’m responsible for – I might just want another employee to look at one minor component of the invoice. I don’t need them to review the entire thing, so I can just message ‘Hey, can you look at this specific section?’ I could have done that by email, but it wouldn’t require a full email.”
“Having Stampli messaging within the platform allows for more concise and efficient messaging instead of email chains being circulated. It’s just better organized so your specific question doesn’t get lost in someone’s inbox somewhere.”
“It’s very specific and organized within the Stampli application so all things related to AP, including any questions and dialogue, gets captured in Stampli. You don’t have to look for it in different messaging systems.”
EFFICIENCY
Freeing up half an employee’s time
“The one area of savings we received is actually more in terms of FTEs. Prior to me joining, they had one person whose 40-hour-a-week job was all things accounts payable. Within the first month or two being on Stampli, that person now has a hybrid role where about half their time is spent on accounts payable. The other half, they’re now working payroll and other accounting journal entries and tasks within the accounting department.”
“We freed up half a person in terms of responsibility to not just do AP but do different tasks. That person likes it because it’s a way for them to grow their career and get exposed to more things instead of just doing AP 40 hours a week.”
“As a CFO very focused on profitability and trying to get the most out of our team, it allows us to throw additional people at problems since they’re not spending time chasing people down about AP processes.”
ERP INTEGRATION
No more duplicating work between systems
“One of the reasons we went with Stampli and one of the biggest things we find value in is just the interoperability with our accounting software. We don’t have to reproduce any work – it’s not like we’re logging something in Stampli and then logging something in our accounting system. We’re able to push that data back and forth.”
“Stampli understands information coming from our accounting software and vice versa. That was one thing I was scared about and wanted to avoid – the duplication of efforts. The fact that Stampli is fully integrated within our totally separate accounting system has been a big efficiency boost and has made things quite easy.”
“I’ve sometimes been part of organizations where two systems don’t work together or talk to each other, then you have to do the same work in two different programs. Stampli being able to seamlessly integrate with our ERP has been absolutely seamless and a game changer in how we run our accounting department – we’re closing our books a lot quicker.”
Beyond AP: How Stampli adapts to solve more than just Invoice Processing
Doctors focus on patients, not paperwork
Adaptability
“We really like the feature in Stampli where you can set up a system of approvals. We have some invoices that are quite large in dollar amount, and we don’t want to burden just a few people with all the approvals. We want to spread that out and have lower-level managers and supervisors gain some responsibility in owning certain invoice approvals.”
“The edge case that’s been helpful is setting up multiple approvals where maybe John approves it first, then it goes to his manager for a quick review. It takes work off the higher-level folks – they can do a more expedited review knowing their lower-level staff have already signed off on it. Our invoicing approval process works around the clock in real time instead of shuffling paper around one at a time.”
Intuitive enough for non-accountants, too
Persona-centric design
“The biggest surprise was how quickly we got it launched and implemented. Before I joined, they had tried an AP solution within our accounting software for a few months but were never able to go live with the tool. I tried to get it live too and was unsuccessful.”
“After about six months trying to get an accounting system AP module live, the team’s tolerance was very low. I’d imagine they were pretty skeptical about how quick we’d be able to get this off the ground since we’d failed previously with a different program. But within two weeks, we were pretty self-sufficient and using it.”
“Stampli is set up to be very intuitive. Even if you’ve never used Stampli or an AP system, all the buttons and tabs are in a way that makes sense to an accounting person, but also someone without that background. Our team was pleasantly surprised by how quickly we figured out Stampli and got it up and running.”