Kirby Group Engineering is an industry-leading engineering contractor working across Ireland, the United Kingdom and Europe. With over 1,400 employees, the group's entities provide electrical and mechanical engineering services to a wide variety of sectors, including industrial, commercial, substations and renewables.Following a period of growth, Kirby Group Engineering was looking to streamline and automate accounts payable processes to become more efficient. With this in mind, and as part of a drive to future-proof processes across the business and move away from manual ways of working, the team made a decision to invest in automating their invoicing.
Many of the invoices Kirby Group Engineering received from suppliers were problematic, and invoice queries required manual intervention to resolve. With their current ways of working relying heavily on time-consuming manual processing of invoices offering no easy way to scale and drive efficiencies for the growing number of transactions they were receiving, Kirby Group Engineering was looking for a new invoicing solution to improve the speed and accuracy of processing.They had also recently moved to a new back-office system, Microsoft Navision, through the assistance of consultancy firm 4PS. A seamless integration with this system was non-negotiable.
A rapidly growing volume of supplier invoices with no automation meant the AP team was locked into time-consuming manual processing, with no realistic route to scale as the business continued to grow.
Invoices frequently arrived with errors that required manual intervention to resolve, generating a constant stream of queries and consuming AP team time that should have been spent on more productive work.
A complex multi-country group structure meant that standard invoicing logic couldn't be applied uniformly across entities. The solution needed to handle this without requiring a different process for every country.
