Grand Valley Fortifiers, Ltd. (GVF) is an animal nutrition company that has been providing vitamin and mineral premixes to swine, dairy, beef, poultry and sheep farmers throughout Ontario and Canada for over 55 years. By providing sound nutritional solutions and innovative feed ingredients, GVF strives to enable producers to achieve the best possible production at the lowest possible cost.
Challenge
Could Grand Valley Fortifiers automate expense processing given Ontario’s unique HST taxes? Prior to deploying the Concur + Wipfli solution, GVF’s reimbursement process was painstaking and tedious. In order to submit weekly expenses, employees collected paper receipts, manually populated an Excel template, printed a cover sheet for each report, stapled accompanying receipts, and then delivered the batch to Accounts Payable – where one person would go through another series of manual steps to calculate reclaimable tax before entering the claims into Microsoft Dynamics GP.
“Even though she memorized all of our GL codes, our AP manager was buried in paperwork most of the time,” says Wes Farquharson, IT Manager for GVF. “Because we used an entirely manual paper submission process, the time spent processing claims for reimbursement was long and visibility into expenses was difficult. As our company grew, the inefficiencies of this process became exponentially evident.”
After investigating a number of platforms, Farquharson acted on the recommendation of business partners and selected Concur to automate GVF’s expense process and provide better transparency into expense management. “Mobility was very attractive for our sales team,” he says, “and the fact that Canadian tax rates were built into the software made it an easy choice.”
Solution
AP transactions – including VAT tax recovery – reduced from 12 Hours to 30 minutes Automated expense reporting, however, solved only half the puzzle. Given Ontario’s unique tax requirements, the system also had to account for the portion of reclaimable tax for each expense entry. “Since Concur automatically calculates and allocates taxes, all we needed to complete the system was a flexible product that could import the fields required to fully generate AP transactions without the need for modifications,” Farquharson says. “Our goal was to be able to download claims as needed and create an AP batch with little to no interaction.”
They leveraged Concur’s App Center partner network and selected Wipfli’s ExpenseConnect. “We had a great implementation specialist that understood very well our needs as well as Ontario’s HST taxes,” he says. Deployment was done remotely and onboarding took only three weeks.
Benefits
“Eliminating the need to manually transfer expense claims to AP transactions within Dynamics GP has made the largest impact to our internal efficiency,” Farquharson adds. “Since deploying Concur Expense and ExpenseConnect, we have processed hundreds of claims with ease. What used to take 8 to 12 hours is now done in 30 minutes. Not only does this allow more time for other relevant tasks, but we’ve also lowered the cost of reimbursing our employees.”
Whether in Canada or elsewhere, businesses of any size and industry can streamline their financial systems – without incurring IT costs or manual data manipulation.
