Webinar interview on 20 October 2022 with Sharone Pieterse, Accounts Payable Supervisor, on how Amka replaced their manual activities with BEST Vendor Recons to achieve automated and fast vendor reconciliations in SAP.

Amka is a South African company with over 60 years in the Health and Beauty Industry. Their Vision is to be “Brand leaders in the Health, Beauty and Home Care Industry.” Their purpose is “To enrich people’s lives by creating and sharing abundance.” Visit www.amka.co.za to find out more.

The key business driver in implementing BEST Vendor Recons and BEST Statement Reader 6 years ago was that vendor recons was a manual, time consuming activity. We were doing recons on excel – copying and pasting from SAP and this would take 1 to 2 weeks.

It is so easy with BEST. We email the statement to BEST Statement Reader (BSR) (excel and PDF statement formats), quick fixes may be required if formats change otherwise the statement loads immediately into BEST. The line items match to SAP and VIM (Vendor Invoice Management from OpenText) items and pulls open item info through to the BEST recon. We can pick up easily when invoices are missing.

With a click of the button our recon is done. All very quick and easy.

Amka achieves an automatic matching rate of 98,5% i.e. no user involvement required. Our larger statements are loaded through BSR. For smaller statements we use the copy function in BEST.

The main benefit of using BEST is time savings achieved. For the 40 suppliers that I do – it takes 2 to 3 days to finalise recons. Previously this could have taken up to 2 weeks. Also, recons are automatically emailed to suppliers.

The most valuable Recon Category to me is Amount Payable per list as we can balance back to open item per vendor. We can easily see if something is missing. Missing invoices and POD’s are also in their own category so makes it easier to relay to the vendor.

Auditors either access BEST system directly or request downloads. They appreciate being able to have a full view throughout the year. For our Finance Year End – we recon in reverse to get back to 0. With BEST we can review previous months so audits are much easier and can refer back where necessary. With excel history it was gone or we would have to refer to hard copies. Auditors like to see recons balancing back to ledger.

The Output Recon report is our most used and important BEST report. It gives a full view of something missing and shows what the recon looks like pre supplier issue. We can also see all queries via the Statement Reconciliation Report. The Matched Docs report is also very useful.

Thank you Sharone for your input and Eventful People for setting up this Webinar! https://www.eventfulpeople.com/

Download the BEST Case Study – Amka AP & BSR.

Find out more on how to automate vendor reconciliations in SAP with BEST.