Animal Humane New Mexico

Animal Humane wanted to automate their AP process for years. The onset of COVID and remote work was the perfect time to implement. Processes that used to take a day now take 10 minutes. Along with processes flowing smoothly - they are also running completely paperless as a company.

Background

Animal Humane New Mexico is a nonprofit animal welfare organization serving more than 10,000 homeless and at-risk dogs and cats each year and has re-homed 100% of healthy pets in their care.

The Challenge

Animal Humane had been talking for years about automating their AP process. It all started in 2019 when the company decided to go paperless and found their paper-heavy AP process limited their goal. When Teresa and her team would get an invoice, it would be either through email or direct mail. If it were an email, they would have to print out the document, stamp it, and take it to another building to get coded. Direct mail was done the same way. After it was coded, it was sent back to Teresa and her team for approval.

All of this took an extended amount of time to complete and a lot of back-and-forth movement of the physical copies between different buildings and departments. 

With the onset of COVID, the team was forced to develop a better plan for invoice and journal entry approvals as most employees were working remotely. Teresa McKennon, who oversees Animal Humane’s accounting function, was tasked with finding a solution that would allow them to streamline and automate the process.

Why Nutrient Workflow?

Teresa wanted an easy-to-use interface for the end-users and a simple backend system so she and her team could immediately jump in to begin building forms and processes. Teresa also wanted a system with no limits on the documents that can be uploaded, custom reporting capabilities, complete traceability, and scalability across the organization– all at a reasonable cost.

After talking with the Nutrient Workflow team, the primary reason Teresa saw Nutrient Workflow as a good fit was the product’s scalability, as she saw several additional use cases coming. Being able to leverage Nutrient Workflow’s open, REST-based API will figure prominently in those use cases, according to McKennon.

“Having our AP process automated has saved us an entire FTE.”
Teresa McKennon, Senior Finance Manager

Implementation

Once they dug in, they realized that their approval process was more complex than initially thought since they did everything via email or mail before with many moving parts, forms, approvers, etc., that had to be considered in this stage.

The team reached out for additional help from the Nutrient Workflow Service and Support teams to transform their manual workflow to a digital, cloud-based application. She was aware that there was a complex process that she wanted to put into action, so she didn’t always have to put information in two different places. She wanted to change their finance system and reflect it immediately in Nutrient Workflow. She and her team and the Nutrient Workflow team were able to do some screen-sharing sessions and make this request reality for Teresa and her team. Nutrient Workflow’s team took the time to listen to Teresa and what she wanted to implement and help make it happen.

“Processes that used to take a full day or more are now only ten minutes.”
Teresa McKennon, Senior Finance Manager

What They’ve Built

Teresa’s team has created multiple forms and two processes in their Nutrient Workflow instance. Since they have so many approvers and coding options, Teresa wanted to edit the line items, so the front-end did not look overwhelming to those approvers going to code. By adding a separate section to embed those 14 different coding options, her team can choose which of the 14 they want to fill out, and autofill will help them along the way. 

The process goes from Teresa choosing a header and sending it to be coded, having this be approved or declined with an email notification, and then creating a weekly summary report. 
 
If the invoice needs more information, rather than walking to another building to have the paper form be refilled, she can send it back to be edited/updated, and the process will continue from there. This process has saved so much of their time during the workweek.

Animal Humane of New Mexico’s AP Workflow in Nutrient Workflow (Click for Larger).

Results

The initial rollout went well and has been well-received by the users. Processes that used to take a full day or more are now only ten minutes. This has not only saved Animal Humane New Mexico time back during the week, but they did not have to hire someone during the COVID pandemic to do their AP processes. 

Other than time and money – the company is finally running completely paperless. There is no need anymore to flip through paper forms; everything can be done on the screen, ensuring faster approvals turnarounds. 

“Communication is better with automation, even with our workers not in office every day.”
Teresa McKennon, Senior Finance Manager

What Will they Nutrient Workflow Next?

There can be countless ideas on what is to come next for Animal Humane New Mexico, but step one is getting Daily Cash into Nutrient Workflow for attaching documents and approving. This process will be a helpful management tool for Teresa for traceability and reporting reasons. While the options are near endless, it’s reassuring to know that Animal Humane has multiple different processes in mind to begin implementing in 2022.