Increasing reconciliation volumes and efficiency with BEST at Heineken Beverages

Global alcoholic beverage producer Heineken Beverages leveraged BEST’s reconciliation and statement reader tools to automate over 740 vendor reconciliations monthly with 99% auto-match rates. BEST provided intuitive, easy-to-use tools while enabling extensive integration across Heineken Beverage’s procure-to-pay landscape.

Heineken Beverages

Heineken Beverages is a leading global alcoholic beverage producer looking to expand its reconciliation volumes across over 740 vendor accounts monthly. With a cumbersome legacy system, Heineken Beverages sought an automated, efficient, and user-friendly solution directly integrated with their SAP ecosystem. By implementing BEST’s reconciliation and statement reader tools in 2021, at Distell (Heineken Beverages since 2023) achieved these goals.

Our approach

• Heineken Beverages required BEST to integrate with two external 3rd Party Invoicing tools, viz ReadSoft and Coupa, to be able to reconcile the vendor statements to data not yet posted in SAP.
• Heineken Beverages required real-time visibility and reliable data to facilitate transparent and compliant reconciliations.
• Ensure Heineken Beverage’s system can integrate the data from both SAP and Coupa.

Results

• BEST provided intuitive, easy-to-use tools while enabling extensive integration across Heineken Beverage’s procure-to-pay landscape, including SAP, Coupa, ReadSoft, and more.
• No manual intervention is required. 
• Heineken Beverages is achieving time savings and doing more recon volumes. 
• The system is real-time. 
• Lots of reporting options available (They had no reporting previously.)
• Reconciliations have become less cumbersome to do, and that gives Heineken Beverages the opportunity to ensure that they can do more of the smaller recons, which previously were not being done.
• Post-go-live, Heineken Beverages is averaging over 740 automated reconciliations every month, with auto-match rates nearing 99%. 
• The Auditors accessed the BEST recon tool during Heineken Beverage’s Financial Year end and were able to easily audit the reconciliations.

Liana Barnard adds, “We trust the information from BEST, and we have done spot checks to ensure it is the correct information that is pulling through, including VIM Documents, Coupa, PD and GRIR.”

With a rapid implementation delivered remotely, BEST’s reconciliation functionalities are seamlessly integrated across technologies and processes at Heineken Beverages. The user-friendly interface saw high adoption rates from Heineken Beverage’s AP team and facilitated quick issue resolution.

For Heineken Beverages, BEST delivered an integrated, scalable platform to shift reconciliations from a cumbersome bottleneck to an efficient, transparent baseline, facilitating further procure-to-pay enhancements.