Pairsoft Gives Excelsior College a Better Way to Handle Invoices and Audits

The Client

Excelsior College is a private, non-profit institution with locations in Albany, New York, and Washington, D.C.

The Challenge

Excelsior’s financial systems manager, Tom Weaver, along with accounts payable specialists Kim Aguado and Maria Johnson, process approximately 25,000 invoices each year using Microsoft Dynamics GP.

Before PairSoft, the major challenge was getting invoices delivered, approved and returned in a timely manner. “We sent them to people via interoffice mail for signature approval, but it was hard to track where it was in the process once it left our office since we didn’t know who had it, or whether or not it had arrived safely to the correct department,” he recalls. “Plus it may be a middle manager or department head – who might be taking vacation – who needed to sign off. That was a long process.”

In addition the school also undergoes a thorough audit process annually. This typically requires hours to gather the materials that auditors request.

The Solution

With PairSoft, Weaver and his peers quickly and easily deliver electronic images of invoices 24/7 straight to the correct parties who can simply hit an “Approve” button. Staff members receive daily email reminders until paperwork gets validated.

“We know where everything is at all times,” Weaver asserts. “And when someone in the finance office pulls up a vendor record, a pop-up shows on the screen mentioning any attachments, like W9s, invoices and check payments.”

PairSoft makes audits a snap, too, since documents can be sourced immediately.

The Results

“I loved PairSoft from the first time I learned about it,” Weaver recalls. “It seems to almost be part of GP – it didn’t seem like a third party product. It works seamlessly. I didn’t need to research anything else.”

He adds: “It has saved us an enormous amount of time. Data entry for 10 invoices has gone from 15 minutes to 7 minutes and approvals that normally took about one week are now completed in two days. We’ve eliminated 50 percent of our file cabinets. Oh, and tons of brown interoffice envelopes! We went from using 50 brown interoffice envelopes per week to 20.

“The bottom line is, I can’t imagine using GP without it. The one thing that always reassures me is PairSoft is the only one Microsoft gave their blessing to by making it MS certified. I know that we made the right choice six years ago.”

Measures of Success

• Audits are easier to complete
• Invoices are getting to the right people and tracked until they are returned
• The approval process is more efficient now that documents are no longer shipped between offices