About Shoppers Home Health Care

Shoppers HHC is focused on providing Canadians with a complete selection of specialty home health care products and services to stay active and independent. With over 50 store locations and growing, Shoppers HHC is Canada’s largest retailer of home health care products and services.

Standard Workflow for Invoices:

Key Challenges for Shoppers:

1. Vendors sent invoices directly to each store.
2. In store, Administrators reviewed the invoices, had them signed off by Store Managers and then input their details onto Microsoft Excel spreadsheets.
3. These spreadsheets were sent by email to head office where they were loaded into the Lawson back office account system.
4. In exceptional cases (ex. where the invoice exceeded a specified amount), paper copies of invoices were sent to head office. In all other cases, paper copies of invoices were kept at store level.

• Time was taken to process the invoices. While there was a relatively fast turnaround time considering it was a paper-based system, they were missing discounts that were available to them because of the time taken to get invoices approved.
• The central finance team had no visibility of invoices at a store level, which made any kind of cash forecasting difficult. They could get a flood of unexpected invoices at certain periods during the month.
• Queries were very time consuming. If a vendor rang head office, head office would then have to contact the store. Similarly, if the vendor rang a store, the store would then have to ring head office to discover the status of an invoice.
• Controls over invoice approvals were weaker than they should be.

With the OnePosting system:

Invoice Workflow Became:

The Benefits to Shoppers:

Key Lessons Learned:

1. Invoices are routed electronically to store, and central finance has visibility of all vendor invoices as soon as they are received.
2. Approvals are undertaken electronically (including escalations) and there is an audit trail against every invoice.
3. The existing upload facility to Lawson accounting system is used, but instead of receiving one or more Microsoft Excel spreadsheets per store, a single file is generated that includes all approved invoices.

• Reallocation of resources from administration to selling on the shop floor.
• Faster throughput of invoices with none getting “lost” on the shop floor.
• Greater accountability.
• Very significant financial benefits, not just from the reallocation of resources but also from improved cash management and better vendor pricing.

• Electronic standards are not as tight as they should be (ex. EDI 810).
• Make it really easy for vendors to submit data, ideally by email.
• Watch out for systems being too efficient! We had to introduce a delay in the system because invoices were arriving before the goods. Now for certain vendors, we “sit” on invoices for a number of days before releasing them to allow sufficient time for the goods to be received.