TCS Schools comprises 15 schools providing K-12 education plus 5 pre-schools. The company has a largely centralized procurement model, with most administrative and operating procurement handled centrally, with small budgets granted to schools for petty cash procurement.
TCS Schools procurement includes a wide range of goods and services, from school and office supplies to building and premises maintenance supplies and services. Some items, such as stationery and IT equipment, are procured, delivered and invoiced on a periodic cycle, either monthly or quarterly. Other items, such as food and beverages for the canteen, are delivered on a daily basis and invoiced on a weekly basis.
Given the volume and frequency of deliveries, TCS Schools needs to be able to easily match its invoices against goods received and items ordered to ensure that billing and payments being conducted correctly and without discrepancy. The company’s size and scale does not allow it to deploy an expensive or complex ERP system. Yet some level of sophistication and automation in invoice processing and bill matching is critical to smoothly and reliably manage the work volume.
Proqura’s 3-way matching module facilitated TCS Schools in automating a large portion of the matching and processing of supplier bills. Suppliers would submit their delivery notes into Proqura, letting TCS know that goods had been dispatched. On receipt of these items TCS could log whether the complete quantiy had been delivered.
Once suppliers submitted their bills into Proqura, the system would automatically compare each line item with what had been delivered and flag any discrepancies.
TCS was able to eliminate 80% of the manual invoice and bill matching work it had to conduct each month, focusing time only on discrepancies and automating the processing of matched bills.
