Streamlined invoicing for increased efficiency

NMBS offers its members and suppliers a range of benefits, including a managed and streamlined invoicing process through its business support and e-trading team. Christina Walker, Head of Finance and Systems, explains the critical role her team plays for members and suppliers in the independent merchant sector.

Invoicing is one of those things that is utterly business-critical but no one wants to have to worry about. At NMBS, we believe invoicing should be as straightforward as possible, so suppliers and merchants can focus on the more important things, such as customer service, product innovation and developing local industry knowledge. That’s why our business support team acts as the go-to contact for all supplier and member invoice issues. Our job is to make invoicing feel almost invisible, seamless and automatic.

Suppliers send us invoices as electronic data interchange or PDF documents, which allows the team to check, process and pass on these invoices to merchants. Our business support team places the majority of these invoices into the merchant’s documentation centre or sends the rest via email or EDI. The document centre allows members to see their financial statements at the end of each month and download invoices. It provides a central location to download all their invoices, rather than setting up tens or even hundreds of different invoicing routes with suppliers.

The pandemic caused a large shift in how our team worked. Originally, we received invoices by EDI or on paper documents. The paper invoices required manual processing, but social distancing restrictions changed this. To keep our team safe, we had to receive invoices electronically, which caused our merchants and suppliers to create a more digitalised invoicing process with us.

To help this change, we included additional software in our digital enterprise resource planning system, which allowed us to process PDFs using advanced optical character recognition technology and move away from paper more seamlessly.

During this process, we helped our suppliers and members understand the time-saving advantages this switch could have for everyone involved and digitise their own invoicing delivery systems.

As our team has moved away from such a manual process, the roles have developed to include people who exclusively work on processing EDI documents and the digital date being received, and people who focus on ensuring the systems are working effectively, so invoices can be processed and paid as quickly as possible.

Digitalisation also allows suppliers to get automatic notifications from us about file errors and missing documents on the same day they are sent over.

If a supplier hasn’t provided an EDI in the last seven days, we also send an email to check if this is correct. These automated processes allow the cash flow for suppliers to be as streamlined as possible.

Avoiding delays and missing documents also helps members’ cash flow because they are sent invoices as early as possible.

By helping merchants and suppliers streamline their invoicing process, our business support team ensure the financial relationship between merchants and suppliers is simple.

Without the attention to detail and financial knowledge of the team, some of whom have been with us for over 35 years, the independent merchant sector could see increased financial admin, invoice complexities and cashflow issues.