Wesfarmers sought to improve their billing processes to help make it an easier process for both themselves and their customers.
Wesfarmers Energy was looking for ways to improve the billing processes of two major divisions: Kleenheat Gas and Unigas. Both companies distribute Liquefied Petroleum Gas (LPG) to resellers, large businesses and households and issue thousands of invoices and statements on a regular basis. The key requirements in delivering these documents are timeliness and making them as easy as possible for the customer to process.
Distributors operating under a reseller agreement generally pay their accounts through an automated direct debit scheme. It is important that these customers receive their weekly invoice statements prior to payment processing, so that the account can be verified and any issues resolved before the debit takes place. Large business customers - such as a retail chain - may receive LPG deliveries at several points and require very detailed invoices and statements to assist their own reconciliation and accounting processes.
Additionally, the more quickly and easily invoice statements can be processed, the faster payment can be made, improving cashflow.
Email delivery of invoice statements was just part of our total billing solution, but it has driven some of the most significant overall improvements - for Wesfarmers and its customers alike. Both Kleenheat and Unigas have four types of communication that are distributed through this process: invoices (issued daily); invoice statements (issued weekly and monthly); statements (issued monthly) and facility fee invoices (issued monthly). Kleenheat Gas and Unigas customers have the option of receiving these documents in either traditional paper form or via email. To date, an estimated 90% of business customers have opted for email delivery, to take advantage of the additional features offered by this service. Up to 1000 emails are delivered each day. A summary of the email delivery process is described below: Wesfarmers transmits data daily to Salmat via secure FTP link.
We process the data and identifies whether each invoice or statement is to be distributed via mail, fax or email. Data for email distribution is input with programmed email template files to the ACI software. The templates allow account-specific variables to be changed for each email.
Emails are generated with or without a digital signature, depending on the capacity of the recipient's system to readily accept emails with digital signatures. The emails are delivered using the address data supplied.
Once emails have been sent, some may 'bounce back' as undeliverable messages due to incorrect email addresses and other problems.
After the agreed failure 'window' of two hours, an automatic report details the email failures and any emails with unknown delivery status. Our system automatically generates a paper invoice or statement for mailing that same day, so delivery is assured.
We also provide a report back to Wesfarmers so that any faulty email addresses may be checked and corrected before the next invoice/statement run. Customers who choose email delivery receive a text-based summary of the statement in the body of the email; a PDF file of the original paper statement; and a CSV file containing summary financial data, which can be directly downloaded into applications such as business accounting software. The latter feature is particularly attractive for large customers - some of whom may receive up to 100 invoices a day - as it saves considerable data entry time and precludes keying errors. Apart from improving customer service, email delivery reduces the production cost of invoice statements for Wesfarmers by more than 50% over the paper alternative. Fax delivery of invoice statements is also offered for certain customers.
The key benefits for Wesfarmers Energy include: Faster distribution of invoices, enabling quicker payment and improved cashflow.
Cost-savings of more than 50% by delivering emails instead of paper documents.
Automatic, same day reversion to regular mail in the case of email failure.
Improved customer service through the provision of CSV files.
Detailed same-day reporting of email failures, enabling fast data verification.
A single streamlined solution for all the different invoice and statement runs.
"Email delivery has improved our own costs and processes, but more importantly it has enabled Wesfarmers to offer a superior level of service to our customers. Enabling our customers to download billing data direct to their systems has significantly improved their own accounting processes and satisfaction with our service."
Garry Baines, Systems Administrator, Wesfarmers Energy
Business Solutions used in this project
