Jon Marius Roald
Error messages and fallbacks turned Skala's invoicing into a daily time sink. Until they found a better way.
– We wanted to move away from manual tasks that could be automated or done smarter, says Torill Bekken.
She’s the accounting manager at Skala AS, so invoicing, transactions, all things flowing in and out of Skala is her domain. But her kingdom was shaky.
Earlier, when outbound invoices or business transactions failed, Skala would get an email notification with an error message. But quite often, the error listed didn’t reflect the actual problem.
– We'd spend hours digging to find the real cause. Often, we'd just give up and send the invoice manually instead. So we would spent a lot of time on tasks that don’t create any value, says Bekken.
30 minutes a day
– Vince came in and said “we can clean it up for you”. So I said “okay”, and I’m glad we did.
Where the old system would send email notifications – often hours or days after something failed – the new Vince solution lets Torill check the status of every invoice instantly.
– I see all of our transactions in a dashboard with intuitive buttons for everything. I can find information instantly, download the xmls I want, spot errors instantly and correct them myself. I’m simply a lot more self-sufficient than before, she says.
This saves time. One team member went from up to 45 minutes daily fighting errors to just a 5-10 minute status check. That's over 30 minutes every day left for value creating work.
"I see all of our transactions in a live dashboard, where I can spot errors instantly and correct them myself"
– Torill Bekken, accounting manager at Skala AS.
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Not just fancy tech
As told by Torill Bekken, Skala are happy with their new billing automation platform. Equally important to her, however, is having consultants who understand accounting.
– We’ve had too many run-ins with fancy tech that can’t deliver on what was promised, or consultants who are business-savvy but don’t understand the tech. We need tech that works and people who know what they’re talking about, says Bekken.
– Did you get that with Vince?
– Yes, the Vince consultants are very skilled. They understand the business, our needs and are good at identifying what’s important and what can wait.
Lessons to live by
Implementation of the new solution went mostly smooth, but there’s always takeaways to learn from, explains Torill:
– Looking back, I should have contacted more customers during our testing phase, so that they had a person at the ready when we sent our first invoices from the new system. We could have caught some hiccups faster that way.
– So how are things today?
– Pretty much great. Most invoices flow automatically, and we spend less time and energy on finding and correcting mistakes. The team can focus on work that matters.
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