Tradeshift helps Birmingham NHS agency to streamline invoice system
A new system designed to deal with supplier invoices more effectively has been introduced at a Birmingham NHS agency this month.
LONDON, UK – 22 Nov, 2011: Tradeshift, the social network for business, has announced that Birmingham Primary Care Shared Service Agency (BPCSSA), the Financial Services Directorate that provides Finance and Procurement to 3 Primary Care Trusts and one NHS Trust across Birmingham, will be using its e-invoicing tool to transform how it interacts with over 6,000 suppliers. The agency has selected Tradeshift to help achieve cost-savings and support the Government’s prompt payment drive for public sector suppliers.
All suppliers can now start submitting invoices electronically via the secure network. With built-in validation, suppliers will be automatically alerted to any inaccuracies in each invoice, ensuring all documents are correctly formatted and reducing the risk of errors. The Tradeshift network also provides a tracking service to give suppliers a clear view of exactly where the invoice is in the system, whether it has been accepted and when payment is due – all vital aspects in maintaining efficient cash flow.
Jennie Grant, CFO (Chief Finance Officer), at Birmingham Primary Care Shared Service Agency, said: “Processing up to 140,000 paper invoices per year was proving a logistical challenge. With Tradeshift, suppliers can access the status of an invoice throughout its journey and contact us in real time if they have any questions. This new process will provide time and resources savings for all involved.
Birmingham Primary Care Shared Service Agency will initially be bringing 2,500 suppliers onto the Tradeshift network in November 2011 and is working towards all 6,000 suppliers to be on board by March 2012.
Christian Lanng, CEO at Tradeshift, said: “Of every paper invoice processed, up to 40% come into dispute – costing both businesses and their suppliers’ time and money in resolving them. Managing thousands of invoices from thousands of suppliers is a challenge however you look at it, let alone working with email and paper formats. Tradeshift is designed specifically to make invoicing simple and transparent for all businesses and suppliers, whatever their size. By rejecting archaic time and cost draining forms of email and paper invoicing and fully embracing e-invoicing, Birmingham Primary Care Shared Service Agency will significantly improve its supplier relationships through prompter payments.”
About Tradeshift
Launched in May 2010, Tradeshift has defined the new way to do e-invoicing by taking the best of social networking and applying this to the professional business environment. We have done this by providing a free and easy-to-use platform for businesses to exchange business documents, communicate and interact with each other in real-time. We call this a social network for businesses.
As the world’s fastest growing social network for business, Tradeshift already has 60,000 companies across 190 countries on its platform and is attracting 2,000 new users every week. Customers include ASP NHS, the French Government, Coop, TDC, DT Group and DSV. Tradeshift was awarded Best Enterprise 2010 at The TechCrunch Europe 2010 start-up awards and was awarded most innovative solution by the Financial Industry (Financial-I).
Tradeshift is a UK Ltd company with offices in Copenhagen, London, San Francisco, Paris and Amsterdam with customers across 190 countries and employs a 50-strong workforce made up of 15 nationalities. For more information please visit: http://tradeshift.com/
About Birmingham Primary Care Shared Service Agency
The Birmingham Primary Care Shared Services Agency (BPCSSA) is hosted by NHS Birmingham East and North and came into being in April 2002. The main purpose of creating a Shared Service Agency (SSA) was to focus on core non-clinical services that are common and essential to all our PCT clients. The organisation aims to encourage and promote:
· Efficiency, by enabling increased economies of scale and through avoiding duplication of services.
· Expertise, reducing city-wide competition for scarce resources and through building areas of expertise that the PCTs can draw upon.
· Partnership, through encouraging and enabling the Birmingham PCTs to work together and share knowledge.
· Focus, through the SSA concentrating solely on improving non-clinical support services whilst the PCTs concentrate solely on improving patient care.
For more information see: http://www.bpcssa.nhs.uk/
Media contacts:
Max Tatton-Brown
EML Wildfire
0208 408 8000
maxtb@emlwildfire.com
