From Paper Trails to Digital Control: How Ballut Farm Transformed Its Invoice Process with PaperLess for Sage 200 Evolution

A Maltese agricultural business that replaced paper-based and email-driven invoice workflows with a fully connected digital process, introduced by PaperLess partner Progressive, cutting invoice processing time by up to 30%.

Insights provided by Kylie Grima, Director, Ballut Farm Ltd  |  Implemented by Progressive | www.progressive.com.mt 

At a Glance

Introduction

Ballut Farm Ltd is a Malta-based agricultural business managing a wide range of operational and financial processes across its activities. More about the company can be found at www.ballutfarm.com. Like most businesses in the agricultural sector, the finance function handles a steady volume of supplier invoices — purchases, supplies, services — and keeping that process organised is a constant operational requirement.

For Kylie Grima, Director at Ballut Farm, the problem was not a lack of organisation. It was a process built around paper and email that had simply reached its limits. Invoices printed and passed between people. Approvals chased by email. Documents filed in folders that took time to search when something needed to be retrieved. The mechanics of it worked, until the inefficiency of it started to become visible in the time it consumed.

PaperLess was introduced to Ballut Farm by Progressive, a Malta-based business technology partner led by Founder and CEO Alex Grima. Progressive works with businesses across Malta to implement and support accounting and business management solutions, and it was through that relationship that Kylie first encountered PaperLess as a solution to the AP challenges the business was facing.

This case study covers what drove Kylie to look for a better solution, how Progressive supported the implementation, why PaperLess for Sage 200 Evolution was the right fit, and what has changed since invoice capture, approval workflows, document archiving, and PO matching became part of Ballut Farm’s day-to-day finance operations.

The Challenge: A Paper-Based Process That Was Costing the Team Time

Kylie was direct about what the problem looked like before PaperLess. The accounts payable process at Ballut Farm relied on paper and email at every stage. Invoices arrived, got printed, moved between people for approval, and were filed once the process was complete. When a document needed to be retrieved  (for an audit, a query, or a supplier dispute) finding it meant searching through physical files.

It was a process that worked in the sense that invoices eventually got approved and recorded. But the mechanics of it were absorbing time at every step. Printing, scanning, forwarding, chasing, filing. None of those steps added value to the outcome. They were administrative overhead built into the process by the absence of anything better.

Kylie identified three specific things the business needed to address:

• The volume of manual work involved in processing each invoice from receipt to approval to recording in Sage 200 Evolution
• The lack of a structured, trackable approval process, which meant approvals depended on email chains that were difficult to monitor
• The time cost of retrieving documents, particularly when audit queries or supplier questions required pulling historical records quickly

The goal was a single connected digital process that could handle invoice capture, route documents for approval, and keep everything stored and retrievable without the paper.

Why PaperLess? A Partner Recommendation That Made Immediate Sense

The route to PaperLess came through Progressive and Alex Grima. As a business technology partner working across Malta with extensive experience in Sage solutions, Progressive was well placed to understand the operational problem Kylie was trying to solve and to recommend a solution that would address it without requiring Ballut Farm to overhaul its accounting environment. PaperLess, with its native integration with Sage 200 Evolution, was a natural fit.

“What made the recommendation easy to act on was the breadth of what PaperLess covers within a single platform” says Alex Grima, Founder & CEO at Progressive. One of the persistent frustrations with paper-based workflows is that information ends up entered more than once: once when the invoice is received, again when it is posted to the accounting system. PaperLess removes that duplication by keeping the supporting documentation connected to the accounting record throughout. What goes into PaperLess flows through to Sage 200 Evolution, and the two stay linked.

Three things made PaperLess stand out from the alternatives, as Kylie and Alex assessed them:

• Integration with Sage 200 Evolution, which meant the AP automation sat within the existing accounting environment rather than alongside it
• Automated invoice recognition, which replaced the manual reading and re-keying of invoice data with an AI-powered capture process
• Configurable approval workflows and PO matching, which together provided both automation and the financial control a director-level oversight requires

The recommendation Kylie and Alex would both make to other businesses considering PaperLess reflects this: look at the full invoice-to-approval process rather than focusing only on the OCR capability. The value comes from having the whole journey covered in one place, properly connected to the accounting system.

How Ballut Farm Uses PaperLess

Four features sit at the centre of how the Ballut Farm finance team uses PaperLess day to day, each addressing a specific part of the process that previously required manual effort.

AI-Powered Invoice Recognition

Invoices arriving at Ballut Farm are captured and read automatically using PaperLess’s AI-powered recognition engine. The relevant data fields are extracted and prepared for review without manual re-keying, which removes one of the most time-consuming and error-prone steps from the process. For Kylie, this is where the efficiency improvement is most immediately felt: less time entering data means fewer errors reaching Sage 200 Evolution and a faster path from receipt to posting.

Invoice Approval Workflows

The invoice approval workflow has replaced what was previously an email-dependent sign-off process. Invoices are now routed automatically to the correct approvers based on configurable rules, with notifications sent and outcomes recorded at each stage. Kylie and the team have full visibility of where each invoice is in the process at any given moment. The approval history is stored electronically alongside the invoice itself, which makes the whole process easier to track and, critically for a business with audit obligations, easier to evidence.

Document Archiving

Every invoice processed through PaperLess is archived electronically and linked to its corresponding record in Sage 200 Evolution. The physical filing that previously consumed time and created retrieval challenges has been replaced by a searchable digital archive. When Kylie or the team needs to find a specific invoice, it takes seconds rather than minutes, regardless of how far back in the records the document sits.

PO Matching

PO matching connects incoming invoices to their corresponding purchase orders before the approval process begins. For a business managing regular procurement activity, this adds a layer of financial control that was difficult to maintain consistently in a paper-based environment. Invoices that do not match the purchase order are flagged before they reach approval, which means exceptions get caught early rather than discovered later.

The Results: 20-30% Less Time on Invoice Processing and a Process That Scales

Ballut Farm is one of the few customers able to put a number on the improvement. Kylie estimates the business has seen a 20-30% reduction in invoice processing time since implementing PaperLess, with meaningful savings in manual data entry, printing, scanning, and document handling across the board.

20-30% Reduction in Invoice Processing Time

This is the headline result, and it is worth unpacking what sits behind it. The time saving does not come from one thing. It comes from removing manual steps at multiple points in the process, the re-keying at capture, the chasing at approval, the searching at retrieval. Each of those steps took time that added up. PaperLess has reduced or eliminated most of them, and the cumulative effect is a process that moves considerably faster from end to end.

For a finance team managing regular invoice volumes, a 20-30% reduction in processing time is not a marginal gain. It is time that can be redirected toward the parts of the finance function that actually require human judgement.

Finance Staff Focused on Exceptions, Not Administration

One of the outcomes Kylie highlights specifically is what the team does differently with their time now. Before PaperLess, a significant portion of the finance team’s day was spent on scanning, filing, forwarding, and chasing. That work has been largely automated. The team now spends more time reviewing exceptions, the invoices that need attention, and less time on the administrative overhead that surrounds them.

That shift matters beyond the time saving. A finance team focused on exceptions is a finance team exercising judgement rather than managing paperwork. The quality of oversight improves alongside the efficiency.

Faster Access to Financial Documents

The move to a digital archive has changed what it means to retrieve a document. Kylie and the team can now find any invoice almost immediately, with the full approval history attached. For a business that faces audit queries or supplier questions, that speed of retrieval is a meaningful operational improvement. It also means the business is better prepared for audit than it was when documents lived in physical files.

Stronger Control Over the Invoice Process

Kylie describes the overall impact as giving the finance function a more automated and transparent process, with documents, approvals, and accounting information connected through the workflow. The approval workflow and PO matching together have strengthened the financial controls around invoice processing in a way that a paper-based process made difficult to maintain consistently.

“PaperLess has made our invoice process more structured and transparent, while reducing the amount of manual administration.”

Kylie Grima, Director, Ballut Farm Ltd

“Having invoices and approval information available digitally has made it much easier to find documents, track approvals and respond to queries.”

Ballut Farm Ltd

Would Kylie Recommend PaperLess?

Without reservation. And the recommendation comes with a specific piece of advice that both Kylie and Alex Grima at Progressive would offer to any business still running AP manually: when evaluating PaperLess, look at the full invoice-to-approval process rather than focusing only on the OCR or data capture capability.

That framing reflects how Ballut Farm has got the most value from the platform. The AI-powered invoice recognition is valuable on its own. But it is the connection between capture, approval, archiving, and PO matching, all within a single workflow linked to Sage 200 Evolution, that makes the difference. Removing one manual step is an improvement. Removing manual steps at every stage of the process is a transformation.

For any agricultural or similar business still managing supplier invoices through paper and email, Ballut Farm’s experience offers a clear and well-evidenced case for making the move. Working with a partner like Progressive to implement and configure the platform meant the transition was supported from day one, which is worth factoring in when evaluating any significant change to a finance workflow. The process becomes faster, more controlled, and considerably easier to manage and evidence, and the numbers support it.

See What PaperLess Could Do for Your Business

PaperLess integrates with Sage 200 Evolution, Sage 50, Sage 200, Sage Intacct, Xero, SAP Business One, and Orderwise. Book a demo or get in touch at paperlesseurope.com/contact-us.