Automating accounts payable processes with Animal Humane New Mexico

Animal Humane New Mexico is a non-profit animal welfare organization serving more than 10,000 homeless and at-risk dogs and cats each year. It has rehomed 100 percent of healthy pets in its care.

The challenge

Animal Humane had been talking for years about automating its AP process. It all started in 2019 when the company decided to go paperless and found its paper-heavy AP process limited its goal. When Teresa McKennon and her team would get an invoice, it would be either through email or direct mail. If it were an email, the people at Animal Humane would have to print 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 McKennon 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. McKennon, who oversees Animal Humane’s accounting function, was tasked with finding a solution that would allow the company to streamline and automate the process.

Why Nutrient Workflow?

McKennon wanted an easy-to-use interface for end users and a simple backend system so she and her team could immediately jump in to begin building forms and processes. McKennon 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 McKennon 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 McKennon and her team dug in, they realized their approval process was more complex than initially thought, since they did everything via email or mail, with many moving parts, forms, approvers, etc., that had to be considered.

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. McKennon 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 the finance system and have it reflected 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 McKennon and her team. Nutrient Workflow’s team took the time to listen to McKennon and what she wanted to implement and help make it happen.

“Processes that used to take a full day or more are now only 10 minutes.”
Teresa McKennon, Senior Finance Manager

What they’ve built

McKennon’s team has created multiple forms and two processes in its Nutrient Workflow instance. Since there are so many approvers and coding options, McKennon wanted to edit the line items so the frontend didn’t 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 McKennon 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 a lot of time during the workweek.

Animal Humane of New Mexico’s AP Workflow in Nutrient Workflow

Results

The initial rollout went well and has been well-received by the users. Processes that used to take a full day or more now only take 10 minutes. This has not only saved Animal Humane New Mexico time during the week, but the company didn’t have to hire someone during the COVID pandemic to take over AP processes.

Additionally, the company is finally running completely paperless. There’s no need to flip through paper forms; everything can be done on the screen, ensuring faster approval turnarounds.

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

What will they automate next?

There are countless ideas on what’s 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 McKennon for traceability and reporting reasons. While the options are near endless, it’s reassuring to know Animal Humane has multiple different processes in mind to begin implementing in 2022.