4,000 invoices a month, back under their own control
Why early childhood education provider BestStart brought outsourced invoice receipting in-house, integrating Xtracta with its accounting system to improve precision and control across 260+ centres.
“With Xtracta we have been able to bring the process back under our own control.”
Claire Hunt
Accountant, BestStart
Invoices processed each month
Childcare centres nationwide
In-house
Receipting brought back from a third party
the need
Growth was outpacing manual AP
Receipting hundreds of invoices each week and manually keying them was laborious. Outsourcing eased the internal load, but it brought its own issues around precision and control.
the CHALLENGE
Outsourcing was costly and slow
Because the third party sat outside the organisation, it didn’t know the ins and outs of the operation. Errors took time to fix, delays of up to 12 hours, and every query carried a cost.
Outsourced
Receipting handled off-site
Delays
Up to 12 hours to fix an error
costs
A charge attached to every query
scale
Hundreds of invoices a week, growing
the APPROACH
In-house capture with a gatekeeper
An in-house “gatekeeper” who knows the business rectifies issues at source.
Suppliers email invoices
Sent to a dedicated BestStart address.
Xtracta extracts
Creditor, invoice number and amount into the system.
Gatekeeper checks
An in-house expert spots and fixes typical mistakes at source.
Coded and approved
To the GL, then to the right centre for payment approval.
IN THE CLIENT’S WORDS
“Wit Xtracta we now have total control over accounts payable.”
Claire Hunt
Accountant, BestStart
the outcome
Precision, control and room to grow
The process is back in-house, reads almost anything, and improves with use.
Control in-house
Ongoing charges run at roughly a tenth of the old OCR approach, with data-entry labour taken out of the process entirely.
Reads anything
Copies, image files and low-resolution scans, all handled.
Learns as it goes
AI recognises patterns and gets better with use.
