Capture is a keeper for rental company

A new invoice capture system will help process the thousands of paper invoices that Rent-A-Center accounting department receives from its 2,600 stores nationwide.

"Because Rent-A-Center receives invoices from more than 85,000 vendors across the country, with about 150 new vendors being added every week, we needed an information capture solution that could handle invoices in every different size, type, color and condition imaginable," says Kristi Toupal, director of accounting distributions at Rent-A-Center.

After seven months of research, the rental company chose Ascent for Payables and VirtualReScan technology from Kofax, which is partnered with Legato's ApplicationXtender and Business Imaging System's services and MasterScan product.

According to a news release from Kofax, Rent-A-Center's accounts payable department used to manually process 15,000 weekly invoices, keying each into the company's payables system, then manually validating the information to ensure accuracy. Twenty-five workers were deployed to handle the volume of invoices. Toupal wanted to find a system that could convert the invoices to electronic form for faster processing, easier storage and retrieval.

"Now the manual keying process is gone because the technology automatically captures vital invoice data regardless of where it appears on the document, and the data validation process is much easier because there is lower probability of human error during the inputting of data," says Anthony Macciola, VP of development and marketing at Kofax.

According to Toupal, because of the high accuracy, departmental employees are 67% more productive than with the previous workflow.

"The information capture solution has been a tremendous success, as we expect the system will easily pay for itself within one year," says Toupal. "Even more exciting for Rent-A-Center is the fact that managers at the home office have seen our success in automating and streamlining paper-based processes and are beginning to implement the technology for their own applications."