User Story: Food Alert

Mehrdad Modarres, the finance director of Food Alert, was on a mission to simplify the capture and processing of invoices for a decade and has invested significantly in the development of their own POM (Piece of Mind) invoice processing application.

Mehrdad explains: “My number one objective in my day to day tasks at Food Alert is to save everyone time, removing repetitive tasks that add no value to the business, so we can all focus on more productive work. I undertook a very detailed investigation of invoice automation applications available on the market with a particular focus on affordable invoice capture and approval automation”.

Mehrdad was diligent in this process, spending over 100 hours researching the market, looking at dozens of applications including Paperless, Concur, Kofax, Basware and many others before finding iCompleatInvoice Starter in October 2017.

• Increase efficiency across the business where possible.
• Remove repetitive tasks to focus on high-value activities.
• Ensure costs are managed and lowered as much as possible.

Mehrdad simply registered for iCompleat Starter, set it up in a few minutes and started to play to confirm it covered all the basic aspects of what he required.

Next, Food Alert purchased a small amount of “e-Invoice Transaction credits (£0.40p per invoice) to automate the invoice data capture process, delivering all of the invoice header and line detail directly into iCompleatInvoice Starter and tested it against the invoices for two of their largest suppliers.

iCompleat Starter worked as advertised and saved the accounts department a great deal of time.

Mehrdad then contacted Compleat, speaking at length to Phil Douglas (MD) to share his thoughts. A couple of months later, he met with Neil Robertson (CEO) to discuss a 51-point agenda of proposed enhancements for iCompleatInvoice Starter.

Food Alert then upgraded to iCompleatInvoice, becoming the first beta site utilising real time integration into their Sage Line 50 accounting software which is deployed locally in the Food Alert offices. The 5 named user deployment of iCompleatInvoice retails at just £45 per month, making it both affordable and justifiable for every business.

“iCompleatinvoice Starter was a revelation as it seemed to have been designed specifically to meet my immediate requirements. The alternatives either did not have the functionality I required or were priced for much larger organisation and too complex and expensive for our business”, says Mehrdad. 

Mehrdad concludes: “My primary objective remains to save everyone in our business time and I can confidently say that, with iCompleatInvoice, the time savings can be in excess of 90% over any manual AP process. I can also say with equal confidence that there is no equivalent application on the market”.