Smarter Invoice Processing and Employee Onboarding
Otter Garden Centres partnered with Toshiba to digitally transform their finance and HR operations using DocuWare. By automating invoice processing and employee onboarding, they achieved faster approvals, enabled remote working, reduced costs, and improved staff satisfaction, supporting growth from five to eight centres without increasing finance headcount.
The Pain-Points / Challenges
- Manual, paper-based invoice processing that was time-consuming, error-prone, and reliant on physical documents and sign-offs
- No ability to support remote working, leaving finance and approval processes dependent on staff being on-site
- Slow invoice approval cycles across multiple sites, with branch approvals taking up to two weeks
- Heavy manual data entry into Sage 200, increasing workload, risk of errors, and audit complexity
- Inefficient HR onboarding processes, reliant on handwritten forms and manual payroll entry, limiting accuracy and scalability
The Recommended Solution
- Implement DocuWare to digitise and automate invoice processing, replacing paper-based workflows with secure document capture, automated matching, and electronic approvals
- Enable remote access to finance and approval workflows, allowing staff and branch managers to review and approve invoices from any location
- Integrate DocuWare with Sage 200, using automated data export to eliminate manual rekeying, reduce errors, and simplify audits
- Extend DocuWare into HR onboarding, replacing handwritten forms with digital workflows and automated payroll data transfer to improve accuracy and scalability
The Outcome
The partnership between Otter Garden Centres, Toshiba, and DocuWare has delivered a powerful, scalable and transformative solution. What began as a need for remote working and invoice automation has grown into a multi-department digital workflow platform delivering measurable savings, improved accuracy and enhanced employee satisfaction. When asked whether they would recommend the solution, the answer was unequivocal: “Absolutely. We showed the system to another garden centre and they were blown away, especially by the speed and the HR onboarding. We’d definitely recommend it.”
