Bol.com: 'Percentage paid in time exceeds 90 percent'

What does automating financial administration yield? It was one of the topics discussed during the online seminar Lean Finance on June 7, 2018. 'The percentage paid in time has increased to more than ninety percent,' Ronald Vestering of Bol.com let us know.

Bol.com began automating finance for the first time about five years ago, GrandVision in 2012. Moderator Raquel Verwei discussed with Ronald Vestering of Bol.com and Freek Peters of GrandVision in a 60-minute online seminar the critical success factors for continuously improving the finance process, from procurement to payment. How did they approach the change project and what methods did they apply? And what did it get them?

Payment discount

Both retailers had similar results. 'Thanks to a scalable solution, we at Bol.com can process many more volumes with the same number of hands and at the same time handle some growth,' explained Ronald Vestering of Bol.com. 'That in itself is great, but it's also about results such as the percentage paid in time. That used to be dramatically bad, while the number of invoices we can pay on time has now exceeded ninety percent because of this automated process.'

According to Ronald, this is not only beneficial for the suppliers, but also beneficial for Bol.com. 'Commercial contracts are concluded with all those suppliers in which a lot of payment discounts are used. When we still processed the invoices manually, few payment discounts were received. If you can now achieve this for this percentage, it immediately provides a margin advantage in addition to all the work taken away from the buyers.'

Matching rate

Another important KPI is the matching rate. 'We are above 85 percent of invoice lines. So added up, we've had pretty good results,' Ronald says. 'Of course, we always stay focused on what's not going well. After all, fifteen percent of 500,000 lines is still a lot. So we're not there yet,' he laughs.

GrandVision gained more insight into the process: what is going well, what is not going so well yet. 'We are able to measure how many invoices we still need to process. Before, there were piles everywhere and we had no idea how many invoices we were talking about, other than what came into the system. Our KPIs are important; we measure them weekly. That's important, especially when you're hooking up a new country as was the case with us.'

Customer of the process

Participants also had the opportunity to ask questions. Who is the most important customer of the purchase-to-pay process? A great question from Daan van Gent. 'First of all, if you work in accounts payable, the most important customer is the supplier,' Ronald responded. 'But our buyers are just as much a stakeholder. They are in the preliminary process, so we do them the most favor if they are not bothered by suppliers about the administrative process. And that is sometimes quite a challenge. But the better we make sure the process runs smoothly, the more satisfied all the stakeholders are.' At GrandVision, this is not much different, but Freek can't really name a specific customer because they are all important.