ASTRA TRANS is a Czech transportation and logistics company celebrating its 25th anniversary this year since its founding. It delivers goods and shipments worldwide through road, sea, and air transport. Operating globally, the company has been continuously expanding, with its turnover more than doubling between 2021 and 2022 from 300 mil. CZK to 660 mil. CZK. To address this growth, there was a need to advance towards automation, digitization, and innovation, aiming to handle matters efficiently and streamline processes, not only in dealing with invoices but also in their accounting.

Challenges

The company faced inefficiencies in approval processes, where the accounting department often waited for the signature of the responsible person, leading to constant reminders. A single invoice would pass through the hands of managers, assistants, and accountants up to 4 times before being finalized. Due to the high volume of invoices, manual entry and matching with supplier orders led to frequent errors.

Specifically in the ASTRA TRANS sector, analyzing costs and fleet performance required searching for invoices related to specific vehicles. For their ERP system, Doprava 4K, the company sought integration with a tool capable of automating this data retrieval process. Prior to digitization, this activity involved managers physically visiting archives and searching through paper files, causing delays in evaluation.

• Integration with the transport ERP system Doprava 4K
• Accounting entities (fields for extraction) specific to the transportation industry
• High level of manual invoice transcription
• Inefficient communication between accountants and managers

Solution

Our collaboration with the company began in February 2023, chosen for the tool's user-friendly environment and quick implementation. For the specific requirements of ASTRA TRANS, a custom integration was developed. The goal was to add custom accounting entities, including specific cost centers and vehicle license plates. This allowed invoices to match specific vehicles in the accounting system and have quicker evaluation of the fleet performance.

To automate controlling and reduce errors, within the integration, we also configured the matching of extracted invoices from Digitoo with orders' documents in Doprava 4K. In case values such as due date, payment amount, or order number differed from the invoice, they were sent back to Digitoo.

• Integration of Digitoo with the specific ERP system Doprava 4K
• Creation of custom accounting entities such as vehicle license plates and cost centers
• Automated matching and verification of invoices with orders in Doprava 4K
• Configuration of approval processes between managers and accountants
• Implementation of AI reading into daily processes

Results

• Successful integration with the ERP system Doprava 4K
• 80% time savings in invoice processing
• Reduced avg. invoice processing time from 5 mins to 1 minute
• Same number of accountants despite doubling the turnover
• Quicker access to performance data for individual vehicles
• Achieved +91% extraction accuracy
• Regular use of AI extraction for international invoices
• Swift adaptation of the accounting department to the Digitoo tool

"Thanks to added custom entities like vehicle license plates' number, we can generate faster reports and better evaluate the performance of our transportation fleet at the level of every single vehicle." ~ Martin Podzimek, Financial Director of ASTRA TRANS.

Future Steps

In the future, Astra Trans plans to utilize a mobile application for scanning receipts. Similarly, there are plans to fully utilize Digitoo for international invoicing and continually improve extraction accuracy. All these efforts aim to lead to even more efficient and digitized company processes.