East Riding of Yorkshire Council has installed an electronic document storage platform from Version One to enable the council to meet its ten day supplier payment target. The Council hopes that the new software will speed up the processing of 400,000 purchase invoices each year.

The new platform is being rolled out to 1,000 members of the Council’s staff across multiple sites.

The Council will now use a Kodak i620 scanner to digitally capture all purchase invoices and then tag them to the appropriate account within the Council’s Masterpiece accounting system. Version One’s data capture technology will then retrieve the data from the invoices, which the company says can reduce manual data entry by up to 90%.

Phil Leeson, financial controller at East Riding of Yorkshire Council, said: “Paper-based and time-consuming purchase-to-pay processes were impacting our ability to process supplier invoices efficiently resulting in duplication of effort and unnecessary expenditure. As purchase invoices were being photocopied and posted across several sites, they often went missing resulting in unnecessary delays.”

Reducing the amount of paper documents will also present the Council with space saving opportunities and enable workers to view, accept, query or reject invoices from their PCs.

“As well as improving payment processing efficiency, Version One’s systems will free-up space that is currently used to store hundreds of boxes full of paper documents,” said Leeson. “The time and costs associated with the filing and retrieval of paper documents will be eliminated as authorised staff will have access to documents at a touch of a button.”

The Council hopes the new system will also reduce its carbon footprint. “This elimination of paper and the associated printing, photocopying and postage of documents will also help to reduce our carbon footprint in line with Government targets,” said Leeson.

East Riding of Yorkshire Council is one of the largest local authorities in England, covering 930 square miles with a population of 330,000.