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Purple Strengthens Controls and Speeds Invoice Processing Time with Stampli
About Purple
Purple is an innovative comfort product company that designs and manufactures products to improve people’s lives. It designs and manufactures a range of comfort products, including mattresses, pillows, and cushions, using its patented Hyper-Elastic Polymer® material designed to improve comfort.
The Challenge & Solution
Challenge
Purple, the Utah-based company that kickstarted the mattress revolution in 2013, is known for creating the “World’s First No Pressure Mattress.” To do so and continue delighting the 42,000+ customers that have left verified reviews of their products, they work with about 1,350 vendors.
As Peter Taylor, Corporate Controller at Purple says, “Our AP inbox was like a giant black hole. We would request that our vendors send invoices to a Purple accounts payable email inbox that was managed by an AP clerk and an AP supervisor.”
“We did weekly pay runs that took our two resources nearly two full days to draft the list of vendors we needed to pay that week as they manually searched through Outlook to determine which bills needed to be paid.”
“We needed an AP automation platform that would provide full control of the invoice lifecycle, allow us to centralize communications and collaboration on each invoice so we could better manage the process, reduce our backlog, and easily track all invoices to keep auditors happy.”
Solution
“We initially tried to implement Concur Invoice, as we were already using their expense tool. But my team was reluctant to use the tool, as it required a professional services engagement to get it implemented. Months later we hadn’t made a dent in our invoice backlog.”
“The functionality didn’t work well with our system, especially for invoices that go through PO, which is 65% of our volume,” says Peter.”
During this time Peter had received a marketing email from Stampli and after determining Concur was not the right solution, he decided to try Stampli.
“I’ve gone through many software implementations. We tested Stampli over a two to three week period and what differentiated it was the user experience. Our AP team was immediately impressed by the simplicity of it compared to Concur,” adds Peter.
Hear it from the customer
We needed an AP automation platform that would provide full control of the invoice lifecycle
Bottom Line
~3 FTE Days Per Week Regained for Other Value Add Projects
Prior to implementing Stampli, Peter was considering adding a third AP employee, but found he didn’t need to. Purple now has 90+ people using Stampli, most of whom are approvers, who got up and running quickly.
“The workforce productivity optimization has been, in my mind, the best because I like my team doing things that add value to our business, like expanding vendor relationships, and delivering goodwill via our modernized AP workflow to the rest of our organization,” says Peter.
Reduction in OPEX,Costs to Process Invoices
“We’re definitely seeing a reduction in OPEX with Stampli. Not only have we reduced invoice backlog by at least 50% in the first few months, but we’ve eliminated paying duplicate invoices. That’s something that seemed to happen more often than not,” says Peter.
Because Stampli is cloud-based, power and general users have anytime/anywhere mobile access, so if they’re working remotely, invoice processing is still lightning fast.
100% of Invoices Are Now Properly Documented
Before, only 25% of invoices were properly documented in Oracle NetSuite and they didn’t have an established purchasing policy. According to Peter, “When it came to mapping approvers to invoices, it was done by tribal knowledge our AP clerk had, as they knew who in our organization had a relationship with a specific vendor.”
Peter says, “With Stampli 100% of our invoices are properly documented. With automation, approvals based on amounts or purchase type are all embedded into the application. We’ve eliminated gaps with a tool that helps track our workflow and approvals throughout the entire lifecycle.
As a publicly traded company, Purple’s procure to pay (P2P) process is highly regulated and they have SOX and other regulatory compliance requirements. With Stampli, Peter says “the audit process has become self-service, as we can simply send an invoice URL to the auditors and they can quickly find what they need.”
63% Faster Invoice Approvals
“With Stampli we have reduced the time to process invoices from eight days to three days. One of the areas in which we’ve saved the most time is in getting invoices into the system. The second area in which we’ve dramatically reduced time is in getting approvals,” says Peter.
The previous process took their AP team too much time to decide who the approvers should be. “Using Stampli to automate data entry and leveraging artificial intelligence (AI) and optical character recognition to apply GL codes has been great. It’s helping us route invoices to the right approvers much faster.
“Billy the Bot really stood out to us, too. The ability to have that learning feature has been invaluable and was something that we didn’t find with Concur Invoice,” says Peter.
How Purple Stepped It Up
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