How Coast Flight Reduced Time Spent On Processing Invoices By 30%

Maintaining Spend Control In A Growing Company

Coast operates across 3 different locations across the United States. Each of these locations has different purchasing needs. Each location purchases its own supplies to run the operations that include servicing and maintaining its fleet of planes.

With operations across many locations, each location was doing its own purchasing. Each location would maintain its own purchasing records in spreadsheets. The accounting department didn’t know about those purchases till the invoice showed up. The centralized accounting department had to cross-reference incoming invoices with those spreadsheets.

Due to the manual process, the team was spending a lot of time on processing invoices. Moreover, there was no control over who was purchasing what in the company.

The manual process at Coast was a combination of spreadsheets and shared drives which the team used to process the invoices through the lifecycle. The incoming invoices were kept in a shared folder which the team processed by matching each invoice to the orders in the spreadsheets. If the team found the correct purchase order and amount, the invoice was processed.But that was not always the case since all purchase orders were not captured in the tracking spreadsheet.

If the order was changed after placing the order, then that was not always reflected in the spreadsheet. The accounting team would have to go chasing people if the purchase order number was missing on the invoice. If the invoice amount didn’t match the purchase order amount then the team had to figure out the root cause. Buyers often didn’t keep the spreadsheets up to date and when an invoice would come in there wouldn’t be anything in the spreadsheet to match. The invoice would change and it’s a different dollar amount than you put in the spreadsheet.