Streamlining document processing from invoice
receipt to payment at Henderson Global Investors

Henderson Global Investors (Henderson) is a leading independent global asset management firm. The company provides its institutional, retail and high net-worth clients with access to skilled investment professionals representing a broad range of asset classes, including equities, fixed income, property and private equity.

Headquartered in London, Henderson has over £56 billion of assets under management of which £9.3 billion is in direct property funds. It employs more than 900 people worldwide and has offices in Amsterdam, Frankfurt, Luxemburg, Madrid, Milan, Paris, Vienna and Zurich as well as in the USA, India, China, Japan, and Singapore.

The Challenge
Henderson wanted to upgrade its Property Funds Accounts Payable process in order to reduce paper flow as well as to improve efficiency and process transparency. With the accounts department already handling more than 20,000 purchase invoices each year, streamlining the way that these were tracked and authorised was a major priority as existing manual methods were time consuming.

This was becoming increasingly important as the company’s European business continued to grow. Henderson also wanted to make the process of paying invoices more efficient and to eliminate unnecessary delays or duplications.

Henderson's

The Solution
After evaluating potential solutions, Henderson asked e-Docs UK to design a solution that would integrate with its existing ERP system and automate the accounts payable process.

To achieve this, e-Docs UK conducted a number of workshops with Henderson’s Property IT team and Contempus, the specialist supplier of process automation solutions, in order to develop an interface to achieve interoperability with the existing IRES property management and accounting system.

This integration required complex issues to be overcome including differing European VAT rates. After carrying out a successful proof of concept exercise, e-Docs UK then proceeded to the deployment phase of the project.

The complete solution was deployed in just four months and all invoices are now shipped direct to e-Docs UK for processing. This includes scanned copies received from Henderson’s German and Luxembourg offices, which are legally obliged to retain original copies of all invoices.

Using high-speed scanning with powerful data capture software, e-Docs UK can rapidly process high volumes of documents automatically capturing all relevant invoice data from paper documents as well as PDF, XML formats.

Processing is carried out according to pre-determined business rules, and all data is automatically uploaded onto a secure online repository that uses mirrored web servers situated at two separate locations to provide the highest levels of service resilience and data security.

This data is available for immediate online access by Henderson’s accounts department and authorisation requests are automatically emailed to individual fund and finance managers who approve and code each invoice to update the system. If any invoicing problems are found, they are returned to the accounts department as exceptions for special handling.

Automating the approval process in this way has eliminated the need to send hard copies of invoices to individual managers and enabled suppliers to be paid in a timely manner. It has also provided complete transparency of the progress of invoices from receipt through to approval.

As well as helping to speed up the resolution of supplier queries, the solution also allows suppliers to check the status of their outstanding invoices online. This can have the impact of significantly reducing the number of calls to the accounts department.

“The e-Docs UK solution integrates seamlessly with our legacy ERP system (IRES) to create immediate efficiencies. By moving to a paperless AP invoice process we have enhanced control processes and lowered risk of double entry and other similar errors. Having complete transparency of invoice progress with fully auditable controls has fulfilled our drive for straight through processing from invoice receipt to payment.” commented Mark Griffiths, Head of Property Systems and Operations at Henderson. “Adoption has been quick across our multiple European sites and staff have found it very simple to use”.

Contempus