Customer Spotlight: Grocery Store Chain Improves Accounts Payable and Increases Productivity with DocuWare

With four locations in New York’s Hudson Valley, Adams Fairacre Farms began as a family-run farm stand and expanded into a super farm market complete with garden centers. Their stores offer local fruits and vegetables, meat, seafood, deli, cheese, prepared foods, sweets, gifts, garden centers, as well as landscaping, fences and power equipment. 

Each store does its own buying. With 100 managers between all locations, Adams receives and processes over 2,500 invoices a week. The company’s paper-based accounting processes were inefficient and lacked transparency.

Adams chose DocuWare as a paperless document management system because of its flexibility, Intelligent Indexing capabilities and affordability. Once invoices are indexed and stored in DocuWare, the information is automatically imported into their Sage accounting program. This eliminates data entry, improves accuracy and speeds up the entire workflow.

DocuWare Intelligent Indexing uses machine learning technology to remember the format of each document and the field locations, such as vendor name, of index data. Every capture increases the speed, accuracy and reliability of the tool. After just a few documents, capture is automated and accurate. DocuWare Intelligent Indexing is a secure cloud-based service. It takes advantage of “crowd sourcing” to become more efficient every day.

Document workflow software uncovers more high-volume discounts

The ability to research costs and the increased transparency of accounting information is the biggest benefit DocuWare has brought to Adams. The accounting staff can quickly verify where an invoice is in the process and invoices are never lost on someone’s desk. Once the solution was installed, several managers discovered that different stores were being charged different prices for the same item from the same vendor. For high volume items, even a small price difference can be significant. Armed with this information, the company was able to renegotiate and get better pricing on many items.

“Mangers in our satellite stores did not have the ability to research prices and even those at the headquarters store were limited in the amount of cost research they could do with a paper system. DocuWare is a game changer. It has empowered our employees with the research tool they needed and helps them negotiate the best possible price,” said Mike DeCiutiis, Director or IT for Adams Fairacre Farms.

User-friendly for every level of tech savvy

“Even our most basic computer users had no problem understanding DocuWare and how it could improve their work life. The software was very easy for them to grasp. With DocuWare, we were able to customize our workflow. We estimated that with our paper process, an invoice was touched at least 10 times through the workflow, now our average is only 3 times,” DeCiutiis continued.

Additionally, the accounting department no longer receives requests to pull cost information from managers, who now have self-serve access, saving them over 44 hours a month.

In addition, audits are also now painless. Annually, auditors select random items from the store shelves and ask to see the cost and most recent purchase documentation.  With DocuWare’s full-text search feature, auditors are given access, so they can search for the requested documents themselves, eliminating hours of work for the accounting team.