With more than 2,600 stores in the United States and Puerto Rico, Rent-A-Center is the largest rent-to-own chain in North America. For several years, the Plano, TX-based company had been considering an information capture system to improve access to the 15,000 invoices it processes each week. These invoices deal with services provided to Rent-A-Center’s branches, including costs such as utilities, off-site storage and a host of other items. Invoices are approved at the store level and then sent to the corporate accounts payable (AP) department for payment. "Because Rent-A-Center receives invoices from more than 85,000 different 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," said Kristi Toupal, director of accounting distributions at Rent-A-Center. "After seven months of research, we found that Kofax offered the best system to intelligently scan, classify and register invoices, and ultimately provide far greater return on our investment." Note to reader: Learn more about Kofax.

In the past, Rent-A-Center’s accounts payable department manually processed each of the 15,000 weekly invoices, keying each one into the company’s payables system, then manually validating the information to ensure the utmost accuracy. A staff of 25 workers was deployed to handle the vast volume of invoices.

Rent-A-Center Case Study/Capture Pays Off in AP Efficiency

Toupal set out to find a system that could convert the invoices to electronic form for faster processing, easier storage and retrieval. After months of deliberation, Toupal selected the Kofax technology, partnered with LEGATO ApplicationXtender. Note to reader: Click here for an overview of all Kofax Solutions: http://www.kofax.com/products/index.asp.

"The combination of Ascent for Invoices and VRS was an ideal fit for Rent-A-Center to dramatically improve our accounts payable process," said Toupal. "Now, the manual keying process is gone because Kofax 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."

Accuracy and ease of use were two driving factors in choosing Kofax technology, during the evaluation stage, Rent-A-Center performed bi-tonal scanning of documents on Bell+Howell Spectrum 8000 scanners, and the system’s OCR accuracy when using VRS was far superior. In addition, because the technology is so easy to use, Rent-A-Center’s accounting staff is able to perform all of their scanning for a given day in less than 15 minutes, which represents a total workflow change from the previous time-intensive data-entry process."

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According to Toupal, because of the high accuracy rate of Ascent for Invoices, departmental employees are 67 percent more productive than with the previous workflow. "The Kofax information capture solution has been a tremendous success, as we expect the system will easily pay for itself within one year," said 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 Kofax technology for their own applications."