Growing for Good
How Velox helped Trinity Lands automate complex accounts processes, so they can direct more valuable funds to their communities.
Trinity Lands – a major Waikato and Bay of Plenty agribusiness operation – was founded with a single purpose – to do good in the community. With a substantial portion of profits donated to charitable causes, every efficiency gained means more dollars being directed where they count – funding community-run programmes that make a positive difference to people’s lives.
With large scale farming and horticulture operations to run, the company’s paper-based, manual data entry
processes were impacting on productivity. So they started the journey of automating and integrating their accounting
systems.
Trinity Lands’ Chief Financial Officer, Ngaire Scott, says they chose Occera invoice automation software, which has helped them automate their accounts payable process. But they hit a snag when it came to integrating the Buyer Created Tax Invoices (BCTI) sent by their biggest customer, Fonterra.
“We’ve got 24 dairy farms, so a big chunk of our processing each month is Buyer Created Tax Invoices from Fonterra, which also include all the deductions that come off for items supplied by Fonterra,” Ngaire explains. “We couldn’t directly input our BCTIs into Occera – we needed EDI to get it into the right format, so Occera introduced us to Velox.”
With Velox allowing the two systems to talk to each other, Trinity Lands’ AP processes are now much more automated. Integration has been transformative for Accounts Administrator Raewyn Flavell, who says a task that used to take her half a day each month has now been reduced to just 15 minutes.
“It’s now more of a checking process, rather than a manual data entry process” she says. “We can get a couple of hundred invoices a month just from one of our companies, so using Velox to populate them directly into our financials has been amazing.”
Ngaire sums up the benefits of using Velox and Occera together: “We definitely get faster processing, so we’re saving time, we’re more efficient, and we’re using less paper.”
Ngaire and Raewyn agree the support they’ve received from Velox has also been a huge added bonus. From Raewyn’s point of view, the responsive and reliable help she gets when things occasionally go wrong has been invaluable. And as Ngaire says, the proactive wider systems support they’ve received has helped Trinity Lands do more with the tools they have.
“Velox provides solutions we didn’t even know we needed,” says Ngaire. “I’ve been an accountant for 40 years, but this is a whole new landscape. You don’t know what you don’t know, and they’ve come along and provided solutions that we didn’t even know were possible.”
With limited technical skills in house, Ngaire says they’ve also really appreciated the Velox team’s clear communication and adaptability when it comes to implementation and training.
“They don’t push you past the speed you want to go,” says Ngaire. “They’re willing to work with us at the pace we can go, to provide a good solution for the business. That’s what I’ve appreciated.”
After a year of what Ngaire describes as “teeny steps” towards their integration and automation goals, she says they’re now building momentum on their digital transformation journey. Trinity Lands has some big goals for the future, and switching on to Velox has laid the groundwork for their continued growth and success in the digital age.
