A modernised invoice generation solution that reduces invoice templates by 97 per cent

4Point has a deep history of excellence in digital forms that spans more than 20 years: its CEO is one of the founding architects of today’s standard for electronic forms technology. Many of 4Point’s team member have been immersed with forms and forms technologies for most of their careers, working in a wide range of verticals, from finance and healthcare to government and manufacturing. This has enabled the team to gain a unique understanding of an individual organisation’s requirements, and design and implement an array of unique solutions to match these requirements while aligning with their best practices and future goals for expansion.

 

In this case study we explore how a modernised forms framework was designed, developed and created specifically to integrate with an organisation’s accounts receivable and order management systems to produce multichannel, dynamic, personalised, language-specific and country-specific invoices on demand.

 

This Fortune 500 manufacturing company empowers financial institutions to leverage self-service options through the largest ATM network in the world. By leveraging digital-first technology, continuous services capabilities and operational scale, it enhances branch optimisation, improve efficiencies and maximises accessibility for its customers globally.

 

Their new framework leverages existing information from the business’s repositories, which include a cloud-based accounting system, to automatically build personalised invoices on demand, without having to store the information in the framework. This ensures the data remain secure in their respective repositories.

 

As a global manufacturer this customer requires the creation of around four million invoices per year worldwide, in multiple languages. Its original in-house solution covered 30 different countries, 10 different languages and 10 invoice variants and was developed in the older form maintenance style of one form per country, per language, per variant, leading to around 3,000 forms that needed to be created and maintained. This also limited the company from expanding into new countries or to other business which would require a new language or preference template to be made.

 

Further to this, the organisation was moving to a new cloud-based accounts receivable system which would need to be further extended with other systems such as an international tax system, product lists and stored unique customer preferences, to be able to generate the individual customer invoice.

 

The complex data manipulation needed to populate the invoices was challenging. The manufacturer required the flexibility to be able to view the invoices online, download a PDF version or to have them printed. If they continued down the traditional route of one form per country, per language, per variant, they would never be able to scale their process. These requirements created a high technical debt and would limit the ability to leverage current and emerging technologies effectively.

 

4Point worked with the manufacturing company to implement a new forms framework which not only streamlined the process for on-demand invoice generation based on live data being requested but also enabled users to easily shift this framework into the cloud. Also, the data-driven modular sections meant it was possible to explore how artificial intelligence(AI) could be leveraged in form creation.

 

The new forms framework was designed to be embedded within the manufacturer’s online customer portal, enabling customers to simply select individual invoices and view them in different formats: a smartphone screen, or as a printable PDF.

 

The new solution designed and created by 4Point has expanded the organisation’s reach to 65 countries, 25 languages, 11 invoice types and 15 customer preferences, while reducing the number of form templates to one master template, one template for each language (25 total language templates) and 200 dynamic sections which are inserted based on the information being requested from the invoice system. This has reduced the number of required templates by over 97 per cent. This new framework can also handle languages that flow both left to right or right to left, along with country-specific requirements including currency specifications and government-required QR codes.

 

After implementing 4Point’s new solution, the organisation’s technical debt reduced: changes could be made quickly and easily by updating data from the corresponding applications, thus reducing turnaround time. Producing the same results using the original legacy system would have required over 4 billion invoice templates to handle the new countries, languages and preferences.

 

If you would like to learn more about how you can improve your organisation’s form frameworks to reduce maintenance costs, improve turnaround times or prepare for AI integration, reach out to 4point.com.

---

By Angèle Taylor, Director of Marketing, 4Point