Customer Appreciation Week 2019 – J Ely Business Services Provides 5-Star AP Services to Restaurant Client Base with DocuWare Cloud

DocuWare’s second annual Customer Appreciation Week is here! July 18 is the next official Get to Know Your Customer Day but at DocuWare, we celebrate in June – and why leave it to just one day? Each day this week, we will be honoring one customer. Visit our Modern Digital Business blog daily to read each DocuWare success story and see photos of the festivities. Follow all the celebrations on social media at #DocuWareCustomerWeek.

J Ely Business Services, based in Destin, Florida, provides complete accounting services for over 60 restaurants, bars and other businesses located in Florida and about 12 other states.

J Ely needed a solution that would streamline the AP processing at its one office for multiple clients located around the country: 1) make it faster and easier for managers at client sites to send their invoices in and 2) provide a way for J Ely to store, search, and process invoices efficiently and accurately. Previously, J Ely was inundated with paper invoices and then manually processing them. Managers from all over town were hand delivering packets of invoices to the J Ely office, in turn taking them out of their core job responsibilities at the restaurant or business. As an example, even though a restaurant was only five miles away from J Ely’s office, it could take managers up to two hours driving as Destin, FL is a large tourist destination. Some managers mailed their invoices in or would send them through a digital file exchange but then some invoices could go unaccounted for.

In order to alleviate the manual processing, J Ely outsourced the intense invoice indexing but the quality of work and slow turnaround time forced J Ely to look for another solution. They found DocuWare Cloud to be a perfect fit. The cloud-based solution uses artificial intelligence instead of humans to do high quality invoice indexing and allows managers to store and process the invoices directly from their locations. DocuWare Cloud was also the most cost-efficient and scalable solution for their organization.

With DocuWare in place, J Ely now has over 60 businesses entering their invoices right into DocuWare from their locations and the invoices are automatically indexed, using DocuWare’s Intelligent Indexing, and storage. This storage kicks off a DocuWare workflow where the invoices are automatically sent to J Ely, creating a task in their Task list for them to review the invoice, enter it into their accounting software, and book it. The invoice is digitally sent back to the manager’s Task list for review and approval and then J Ely pays the invoice to finish up the workflow. It’s that simple; on the client side, this streamlined and automated AP workflow saves the clients time and money as managers are no longer out of the their place of business driving and hand delivering invoices. From J Ely’s side, they don’t have to wait around for physical invoice deliveries; they can process invoices in real-time. When a client calls in with a question, they can look up the invoice in seconds and provide immediate customer service. Now that there are checks and balances in DocuWare, accountability has increased and the risk of lost or delayed invoices has been eliminated. Lastly, J Ely was able to remove 12-15 very large file cabinets giving them more space to expand and save on printing costs. They currently store about 150,000 documents in DocuWare and continue to process around 5,000 invoices per month from all of their clients. 

DocuWare has truly changed the way J Ely Business Services operates, giving them tighter controls and making them very lean when it comes to their support overhead.  Due to how much time J Ely has saved with DocuWare, they are now able to bring on new clients, adding 2 to 3 users every couple of months.

“DocuWare has allowed us to electronically receive, process and store everything accounts payable and in 2019, we have expanded that service to include electronic storage of all cash management documents as well. No more boxes of paperwork to store and no more storage units to rent for housing all that paperwork! All of our documents are easily accessible to us via an internet browser,” said Joe Ely, Financial Accountant at J Ely Business Services. 

Check out DocuWare for Invoice Processing in action and see how it can streamline and automate your AP processing:

The J Ely team was very excited to receive their Customer Appreciation plaque, presented by DocuWare Regional Sales Director Mike Leonard. They celebrated the day with a Big Red Truck lunch, on us!