From manual to electronic with ease, courtesy of Greentree

The UK Publishers Association was bogged down in time-consuming old-fashioned processes. Greentree promises electronic efficiencies that will cut data task time from days to hours…

The Publishers Association (PA) is the leading trade organisation serving book, journal and electronic publishers in the UK. When Mark Wharton, director of operations, joined the organisation a year ago, he brought a fresh pair of eyes. And, after getting to grips with the tedious, time-consuming business that was PA report production, he became convinced there must be a better way.

Although the association was already a Greentree customer, Wharton knew PA had barely scratched the surface of the large Greentree suite’s capability as the original decision to move to Greentree was based on its ability to work with PA’s membership-based funding structure without the need for significant customisation. To find out what else Greentree could do he contacted the local Greentree business partner.

Data: from days to hours
Wharton’s first priority was relieve himself of the tedious job of manually extracting data and re-entering it into various spreadsheets. This had to be done before he could produce reports for PA’s board of directors. The fact that Greentree’s integration with Excel allowed for data extraction from Greentree and then the automatic population of Excel spreadsheets immediately promised a big improvement over the previous manual system. Data can also be manipulated and analysed as required, before being exported and mapped to a pre-defined report format.

Wharton envisages the efficiency gains from this will be huge. “This process alone takes days, but we expect that, once we’ve got the system set up correctly, this will be reduced to hours.”

He also expects the accuracy and integrity of the association’s data to be greatly improved. This means management and directors will have peace of mind when it comes to reporting information, for decision-making, as they will be able to trust in its reliability.

This promised improvement led Wharton to look at what else the Greentree suite might do for PA as well.

Online banking equals efficiency
The Greentree suite includes an online banking capability, so Wharton took a closer look at how PA was performing in other key operational areas. He found that hundreds of hours of staff time were consumed writing cheques, reconciling bank statements and chasing approvals and un-presented or lost cheques every month.

PA requires that all payments above a pre-determined limit have to be authorised by an internal staff member and a director or board member. This often sees cheques being couriered to various locations and then back again.

Implementing the Greentree electronic banking module immediately removes the need to write hundreds of cheques, while the e-approvals module allows over-the-limit invoices to be authorised online by the appropriate person, without the need for constant ferrying about.

This is already set to significantly reduce the amount of administrative time absorbed by the payment process. However, Wharton wants to take processes a step further and is presently exploring the possibility of exporting online payment data directly out of Greentree into the banking system.

Wharton says he would like to streamline PA’s electronic banking and payment systems from end-to-end, so as to realise the full potential of electronic banking efficiencies. He expects the cumulative effect of the time and cost savings on the association’s bottom-line will be in the order of thousands of pounds yearly.






> Greentree International
Graham Hill
P: 1800 000 737
E: graham.hill@greentree.com
W: www.greentree.com







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