Suburban Propane powers up with AP automation

The Business

With a network of nearly 200 customer service centers requiring regional approvals for larger expenses, Suburban’s Accounts Payable (AP) department was managing approvals and data entry for thousands of invoices each month. While the company had created a “check request system” that enabled each center to enter recurring expenses for smaller amounts directly into the AP system, the majority of those invoices had to be mailed to one of several regional offices. It was a slow and often unreliable process.

“Our previous system was very manual; at times we would encounter delays in obtaining the approvals required to process invoices,” says Helene Fischer, Assistant VP, Accounting Operations. When Suburban Propane bought the propane division of Inergy LP, it quickly became the third largest US propane distributor by volume. The number of their invoices instantly doubled, and so began Fischer’s search for an automated workflow solution to scale responsibly.

The Experience

While time was of the essence, Fischer was not going to settle. She needed a solution that met a long list of requirements.

The company required a flexible, automated workflow capable of handling their complex, multi-step approval process while allowing invoices to be accepted via regular mail, fax, or email submissions. Other must-haves included a vendor portal that allowed vendors to check invoice status, a 10-year invoice retention period, the capacity to add a customer portal, and built-in functionality that could replace their existing check-request system.

The system also needed to be user-friendly.

“Our customer service reps are incredibly busy, and I had to find the easiest solution for them,” Fischer explains. “They have customers walking in with payments, telephones ringing off the hook, and deliveries that need to be routed. I needed something that was visibly the easiest to look at and handle.”

As Fischer and the selection committee were weighing their options, Corcentric’s Cor360 Approval Workflow emerged as the clear winner. Not only did it meet their requirements, but it also enabled them to get up to speed faster than any other solution they evaluated.

“We were looking at other options, but they weren’t “out-of-the-box” solutions. Everything had to be customized from the ground up,” Fischer explains.

In the meantime, the AP Department was maxed out, even with the addition of 10 temporary employees. They were putting in long hours, and overtime costs were mounting steadily.

“I didn’t have a year and a half for someone to customize a solution,” she says. “Corcentric was amazing; we got up and running in about 75 days, and we got exactly what we wanted.”

And that long list of initial requirements? Cor360 Approval Workflow fulfilled those needs while also helping them meet new challenges along the way. For example, Corcentric simplified monthly tax payments by replacing a tedious manual process with a custom program that automatically extracts the required data from tax spreadsheets and uploads it to the system. This saved Fischer’s department hours of labor and achieved a 94 percent accuracy rate within two months of deployment.

The Future