Removing the friction from invoices and expenses at GVB
- Last updated:
Head of Customer Success, Yokoy
For more than 200 years, Gebäudeversicherung Bern (GVB) has insured all buildings in the canton of Bern against fire and hazards, as well as providing innovative insurance products for private and commercial properties throughout Switzerland.
Its digital transformation in recent years has focused on delivering a world-class experience to its customers, and the next step was to look at how emerging technologies like AI and automation could benefit its internal operations, too.
Challenge: Converting invoice formats manually
As the internal service provider for all 4 of GVB Group’s companies, its finance team is the central point for collating and processing all vendor invoices and expenses from employees across the group.
Despite its modern, digital-first approach, it still relied heavily on manual work in accounts payable with invoices needing to be read manually, assigned the right cost centers, and employees identified for approvals before they could be posted.
When invoices arrived in different formats they had to be painstakingly converted in another tool before they could be processed, and the manual data entry and validation was not only time-consuming but prone to errors, too.
It was a similar story in expenses, too. The heavy manual workload, coupled with a legacy expense tool that was so cumbersome for its people they often chose to forgo reimbursement, meant GVB didn’t have full visibility into company spend and were taking too long to pay invoices and reimburse their people.
Solution: Automated solution with world-class UX
To simplify its invoice and expense processing, GVB needed an automated solution with a world-class UX that would not only be able to take on a lot of the manual workload, but also be a tool people wanted to use.
It needed to be able to independently process a variety of digital formats for both invoices and expenses, and to understand all the relevant data points in every invoice and receipt to reduce the work performed by its finance team.
Similarly, GVB needed its finance team to be able to run at speed, with the autonomy to manage the solution and make changes easily as business needs demanded.
That’s why GVB chose to partner with Yokoy, and bring their invoice and expenses together on an AI-powered platform that would reduce manual work, deliver better quality data to its partners, and provide a mobile-first experience for its employees.
“It is crucial for us to operate the entire system without extensive support. It was equally important that deputies could be easily defined so that workflows could be organised seamlessly.”
Impact: Managing invoices and expenses with Artificial Intelligence
With end-to-end automation enabled by Yokoy, GVB drastically reduces the processing times in accounts payable and expense management.
Overall, its finance team has seen a 512% increase in operational efficiency overall by allowing Yokoy’s AI to take on the work of reading, validating, and approving all its invoices, no matter what format they’re in.
Faster invoice processing
Increase in efficiency in spend management
Return-on-Invest
after year 1
Working hours saved annually
Meanwhile Yokoy’s user experience has made the approval process much easier by providing a clear overview of all the expenses and invoices in the system, displaying account assignments and invoices side-by-side on one screen, and providing the team with new reporting capabilities so they can accurately track every invoice and expense across the company.
And by rolling out Yokoy for employee expenses, GVB’s finance team provided employees with a faster, more user-friendly tool to ensure they record — and get reimbursed for – every expense on time.
"It used to take maybe 10 minutes to a quarter of an hour to enter expense reports. Nowadays, it only takes 10 seconds, if that. That's a factor of 60 or even more."
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