Summit Invoice Register answers Finance team’s prayers
After 15 years of using Dema for the basic financials, Michael J Lonsdale Ltd is migrating to Summit. The Finance team receives more than 25,000 invoices a year, so is keen to take advantage of the Invoice Register module and its OCR function.
Established in 1986 and with its head office in Berkshire, Michael J Lonsdale is a privately owned building services engineering business that offers the full range of mechanical, electrical and public health services. It has many years of design and build experience and is fully versed in using BIM (building information management) technology and 3D modelling on construction projects.
Lonsdale has been a RedSky customer for around 15 years and currently uses our Dema legacy product. Finance Director Anu Kohli said: “We just use the basics financials: job costing ledger, sales ledger, cashbook, purchase ledger and nominal ledger. It takes quite a while now to download reports onto Excel, but we know RedSky is no longer actively developing Dema.”
The company has around 18,000 suppliers on the purchase ledger and nearly 8,000 on the subcontractor ledger. Dealing with all their invoices (more than 2,000 a month, on average) is very time-consuming and labour-intensive.
“We have one person who spends four hours scanning invoices every day,” she said. “The invoices then have to be printed and approved by the surveyors, so every month another colleague downloads all the live job cards for them to review. We also scan and send around 500 invoices a month to our London office, where they are printed out, ready for a director to check and manually sign off each one.”
These practices – and frustrations – will become a thing of the past once the Invoice Register module has been implemented, together with its OCR (optical character recognition) capabilities. The migration can’t come soon enough for Anu: “With the Invoice Register module, the invoice details will be entered automatically onto the system and the surveyors will be able to access and check them electronically against the job card.”
The fact that an image of the invoice is attached to the transaction and available in enquiries is particularly appealing because it means her team will no longer have to waste time rooting through filing cabinets looking for paperwork. Another big plus point is that everything is stored securely within the system and backed up.
In purchasing Summit, RedSky’s flagship product, Anu has her eyes firmly focused on the future. “The government is introducing a lot of changes this year, like Payment Practice Reporting, Making Tax Digital and the VAT Reverse Charge legislation. Migrating to Summit makes good sense, because these changes will all have been factored into the system,” said Anu.
“To be honest, the time-savings that we can achieve with the Invoice Register are the main attraction for me, but it’s also a great comfort to know that RedSky owns both Dema and Summit, because I know they will transfer all our data across safely.”
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