Canaccord Genuity solves the pain of paperwork
As an investment firm, Canaccord Genuity’s bread and butter comes from helping clients get the most out of their money.
At the same time, when it came to the most fundamental areas of managing its own finances – accounts payable and expenses – the firm found it could be savvier. Like many companies across Canada, innovation hadn’t yet touched Canaccord Genuity’s invoice and expense management processes. Its approach was still manual and paperwork heavy, which meant slow approvals and slow reimbursement to vendors and employees.
With a lean team of just five accounts payable staff processing typically 100 expense reports and 200 invoices each week, there needed to be a better way.
“Our team is very ‘go, go, go,’” says Romeeta Bains, manager for AP at Canaccord Genuity. “We can work through a lot of invoices and expenses one day but the next, it’ll all be back.”
Canaccord quickly found its solution in Concur Expense and Concur Invoice. Both solutions use optical character recognition, which distinguishes handwritten and printed letters in scanned documents, making for speedier and more accurate data entry. Because of that, the user experience is much simpler.
Employees submitting expenses, for example, can create their reports within a user-friendly mobile app that uses images of receipts, so they can do away with keeping track of paper-filled envelopes during work travel.
For approvers, including executives who travel frequently, paperwork doesn’t pile up anymore or wait for their return – they can approve invoices at the touch of a button, speeding up payment to vendors.
“It’s quite intuitive,” Bains says. “As long as you can use a browser and drop-down menus, you can figure it out.”
Today, Canaccord Genuity’s AP team can process and reimburse expenses and invoices in under a week. They also have more up-to-date data that informs better decision making. All in all, for this firm, taking day-to-day financial processes to the cloud has proven to be a wise investment.