EngageMed

Challenge

In 2017, EngageMED corporate managed accounting for all 18 clinics, and their AP process was completely manual – clinics mailed paper invoices to corporate who would handwrite required information on each. Once approved and paid, everything was manually collated and filed.

Their biggest challenge was approvals. With so many locations and approvers all over, and no workflow or approval mechanisms in place, approvals could take up to 3 weeks. Rachel Nelson, AP for EngageMED states, “It would take a week just to get an invoice, get it coded, get it sent out to them, get their manual approval and bring it back and then complete the process on it.”

Document accessibility was also severely limited. Nothing was scanned or digitized and filing was complicated. It could take hours to find older documents – it was costly to manually retrieve and deliver file from storage, and weeks were spent each year to ensure that files could be found later.

Solution

EngageMED quickly experienced significant positive changes in AP. Paper files were eliminated – everything (invoices, checks, POs, receipts) is now stored in DocLink and can be accessed easily and quickly.

Nelson comments, “As soon as I receive invoices, I scan them and put them through the shredder. Our clinics do the same and email them to me. Offices can access the documents directly, and everything is linked within the system so locating what you need is easy. This self-service aspect has allowed us all to be more efficient, each office has direct access so they can make sure invoices are coded to the correct department and amount.”

DocLink has also eliminated all manual collating or filing. “DocLink does this for us because each document is indexed with data that automatically links them together,” says Nelson. “It’s saving us all substantial time by no longer having to hunt down physical files.”

The biggest advantage with DocLink is that approval times are significantly shorter. “It no longer matters where someone is physically, they can approve documents electronically. We’ve shortened our approval window from about 3 weeks to just days and even hours.”

Additionally, when EngageMED migrated from its server-based ERP to Acumatica in the cloud, DocLink was able to grow with them. DocLink provided significant stability for the AP department during the transition process, allowing them to capture documents the same way and store them in the same place. Approvals were also consistent – the process didn’t change and approvers were able to do all the same things they did before.

Brad Harper, CFO for EngageMED said, “Migrating to Acumatica was a significant undertaking, but the DocLink aspect went incredibly well, it was a fairly seamless process and works just like it did before.”

Benefits

EngageMED has experienced substantial time saving benefits and ROI since implementing DocLink. AP invoice processing time has been reduced by 75-80%, allowing Nelson to recapture huge amounts of time for more value-added work, including tasks from Harper’s to-do list such as bank reconciliations.

Nelson states, “I spend Monday and Tuesday coding invoices, making sure everything gets processed and approved. And then I cut checks on Wednesday. I’m able to get 3 days-worth of invoices done in just a couple of hours so I now have the remainder of the week for the bank rec and other tasks.”

Harper comments, “When Rachel started, all she did was AP. But DocLink immediately started freeing up her time. We’ve grown over the years, from two entities to many and with DocLink, we haven’t had to add any staff. I’m fairly confident to say that we saved having to add 1-2 fulltime employees by using DocLink.”

Harper continues, “DocLink has definitely improved any process we’ve applied it to, whether it’s auditing or budgeting or just internal review or information sharing. DocLink’s search capabilities are amazing. The program’s ability to index documents – which are not only linked to the transaction but also indexed with individual pieces of data like account code – allows us to pull everything by a specific account. Essentially, we are able to copy the invoices and file them by account code, so something as simple as retrieving an old invoice now takes 30 seconds rather than 30 minutes. We’ve been on a constant wheel of change with significant growth, but DocLink has been a stable and reliable product for us.”