Florida School District Automates Invoice Processing with Document Capture Solution
Palm Beach County School Board, Florida implements OpenText Capture Center to automate its invoicing process to reduce costs and improve productivity. With OpenText Capture Center, the board has transformed its Accounts Payable (AP) department for the digital world.
With recent economic challenges and significant budget reductions, the school board needed solutions to maximize efficiencies and savings. Manually processing an estimated 175,000 invoices annually for the school district, the board’s AP departments faced a labor-intensive, paper-driven process. Additionally, government mandates on record maintenance resulted in high storage costs for paper invoices and additional manual processes.
The board took a measured approach as it rolled out OpenText Capture Center, initially digitizing paper invoices, and capturing scanned images, emails and faxes for the School Board. The school board also began encouraging vendors to email invoices instead of sending paper invoices.
“Automating many of our manual processes has resulted in increased productivity and significant cost savings,” said Heather Knust, director of accounting services at Palm Beach County School Board. “We have been able to reduce staff through attrition and the cost of offsite storage. When invoices are requested for audits or public records requests, we have to order boxes from storage. We then have to find the invoice, remove the staples, photocopy it, and then file it. It is an extremely manual process and invoices can easily be misplaced. We needed a solution to help.”
Bob Rucinski, AP manager at Palm Beach County School Board adds, “We’re very close to having invoices flow through our system from the email mailbox all the way to payment, without any human intervention.”
