What Our Customers Say
“The National Accounts for Payables Manager was well worth the investment. Within four months of implementation, the product had paid for itself and after the first year of using the solution, we had saved SBA Communications $18,451.00. We essentially took 2408 utility vendors and created 599 parent vendors with 1809 children. In addition to the savings, it dramatically simplified our payment processing.”
~ Susan Hudson, Accounting Projects Manager, SBA Communications
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Fashion E-Tailer Streamlines their Payable with National Accounts For Payables Manager
In 2005 this high-end fashion E-tailer was going through a busy time managing a complex and time consuming vendor payment structure that was continuing to grow due to a recent spurt. Their vendors were made up of several individual designers or brands who were subsidiaries of larger companies, creating two levels of parent and child vendor accounts. While orders were made with the individual brands or child vendors, payments also had to be made to the parent holding company, who owned these brands. This created an interesting web of information that over time had become increasingly more complex and time consuming to manage.
The company, in the past, had dealt with this situation by including all of the child vendor information under a single parent corporation account for billing. With ten parent vendors and over one hundred child brands underneath these, this process was immensely time consuming and error prone. When it came time to pay all of these vendors, cutting checks for the parent companies took approximately half a day to track down who had to be paid. This made it apparent that there had to be a better way to manage accounts and streamline their payables.
An ERP Upgrade and a National Accounts Solution
When the e-Tailer decided to upgrade their accounting and enterprise resource planning software systems, having functionality that would manage their parent and child vendor structure was top priority. With a specific need for a product that could link their accounts payables vendors and separately manage each individual entity’s information, they required something in addition to the Microsoft Dynamics GP platform. Their channel partner suggested Binary Stream’s Nation Accounts for Payables Manager, a solution that structured and managed hierarchical vendor relationships within GP.
Simple & Easy to Use Structure
The National Accounts for Payable Manager had many features that presented it as an ideal solution. Its tight integration to Microsoft Dynamics GP windows made it very user friendly for anyone who was familiar with the Microsoft Dynamics GP interface. Once the parent and child relationships were set up in the National Accounts Maintenance window utilizing structural relationships was really as simple as selecting a radio button on Microsoft Dynamics GP payables windows and then checking off the relevant invoices in the child accounts.
Simplified Payment Processing
In the Microsoft Dynamics GP Select Payables Checks, Payables Manual Entry and Edit Payables Checks windows radio buttons allowed the user to associate child vendor invoices to parent payments with ease and efficiency. The controller could sort child invoices by date and print checks to the single parent company for all of these invoice payments. Similarly, credits and returns could be processed and tracked within the system and associated to their relevant parent and child.
Data Inquiries for Reporting
If any of the payment information had to be queried it was easy to find invoices associated with a parent or a child account. The controller could easily search old transactions through the Payables Transaction Inquiry or simply by pulling up the relevant invoice records for either the parent or child account. This flexibility and ability to quickly look back through their records was highly important for their operations.
After reviewing the software the E-tailer decided it was a good fit and they installed the package within the next couple of months.
Return on Investment
Once the system was up and running the benefits of the new structure were immediately evident. The dramatic amount of time saved that resulted from having to merely check a radio button rather than run through the parent files to find the individual invoices for each child vendor was reducing payout times by over 70%. What had previously taken nearly half a day now could be completed in about an hour, with each consolidation taking approximately two minutes a piece. The resulting situation provided a much simpler software solution with a much happier user base.