How Credentia Business Processes Cut AP Workload in Half – Without Cutting the Team

With PaperLess and Sage 50, Credentia’s finance team now handles twice the invoice volume with half the manual effort — and nobody had to go anywhere to make it happen.

At a Glance

Introduction

Credentia Business Processes Pvt. Ltd operates across the UK and India, providing outsourced accounting and administrative services to a varied client base. It’s the sort of work where staying on top of supplier invoices, document trails, and approval chains isn’t optional — it’s essentially the product. So when manual processes started creating bottlenecks in the team’s day-to-day AP workflow, finding something better moved up the agenda fairly quickly.

This case study covers Credentia’s journey to AP automation: the problems that made them look for a solution, why they landed on PaperLess for Sage 50, and what’s actually changed since going live.

The Challenge: Four People Doing Work That Didn’t Have to Be Manual

Before PaperLess, invoice processing at Credentia was a largely manual operation. Around four people were routinely tied up in tasks like keying invoice data into Sage 50, chasing approval sign-offs, and hunting through folders when a client needed a document pulled quickly.

None of it was particularly complicated work — but it was time-consuming, and it had a habit of creating backlogs. Approval chains were hard to track from the outside. If a document went missing or needed to be retrieved at short notice, it took longer than it should. And with invoice volumes fluctuating, scaling up meant adding more hands rather than improving the process itself.

What the team needed wasn’t a bigger headcount. It was a smarter workflow — one that could:

• Take the repetitive data entry off people’s plates entirely
• Give everyone clear sight of where each invoice was in the approval process
• Plug into their existing Sage 50 environment without disrupting how the accounts team already operated

Why PaperLess? A Practical Fit for Sage 50 Users

Credentia looked at a few options before making a decision. The conversation quickly shifted away from which platform had the longest feature list, and towards something more fundamental: which one would actually work well with Sage 50, and which one the team could realistically adopt without a painful transition period.

PaperLess ticked both boxes. It integrates natively with Sage 50, which meant existing accounting workflows stayed largely intact. There was no need to rethink how the books were structured or retrain staff on a new chart of accounts.

Three features caught the team’s attention straight away:

• OCR invoice processing — supplier invoices read and interpreted automatically, with the relevant data extracted and pushed through for review rather than typed in by hand
• Company Inbox — a single, centralised point of entry for all incoming supplier documents, replacing a scattered mix of email accounts and physical paperwork
• Invoice Approval workflows — a structured sign-off process with automatic notifications, full visibility on where each invoice stands, and a proper audit trail

According to Navneet Kashyap, IT and System Administrator at Credentia, it wasn’t just the software itself that stood out. The support during evaluation and onboarding contributed to the decision, a reminder that how a vendor treats you before you sign the contract is usually a reasonable indicator of what comes after.

How the Team Uses PaperLess

PaperLess now sits at the centre of Credentia’s accounts payable operation. These are the features doing the heavy lifting day to day:

OCR Invoice Processing

Supplier invoices used to mean someone sitting down and manually keying data into Sage 50. Now, PaperLess reads the incoming document, pulls out the relevant fields, and queues everything up for review — no copy-paste involved. For a team processing invoices regularly across multiple clients, it’s one of those changes you feel almost immediately.

Company Inbox

Think of it as a single front door for every supplier invoice that comes in. Rather than documents arriving across different email inboxes or landing on someone’s physical desk, the Company Inbox collects everything in one place. The team can see at a glance what’s come in, what’s been dealt with, and what still needs attention. It sounds simple, but it removes a surprising amount of background noise from the working day.

Invoice Approval

The approval workflow has arguably had the biggest impact on visibility. Before, chasing sign-offs meant chasing people. Now, approvers get notified automatically, can review the invoice directly within PaperLess, and the outcome is logged — so there’s always a clear record of who approved what, and when. For a business that handles documents on behalf of clients, that kind of audit trail matters.

Document Storage

Every processed invoice is stored within PaperLess and linked to its corresponding transaction in Sage 50. Retrieval that used to mean digging through folders or trawling email history now takes a few seconds. When a client queries an invoice from several months back, the answer is there straight away rather than a few minutes later.

The Results: Same Team, Twice the Capacity

The shift to PaperLess hasn’t meant fewer people — it’s meant the same people can now handle considerably more. Here’s what’s different:

AP Workload Now Managed by Two Instead of Four

This is the number that tells the story most clearly. Four members of staff were previously needed to manage invoice entry and document review. That same workload is now handled by two. The automation took over the parts of the process that were consuming time without adding any real value — and the team got that time back to spend on work that actually requires human judgement.

Data Entry Dramatically Reduced

OCR processing has effectively replaced manual keying for the vast majority of incoming invoices. Fewer keystrokes means fewer errors, less re-checking, and a noticeably shorter journey from invoice receipt to being ready for payment in Sage 50.

Approvals That Don’t Require Chasing

The structured workflow means sign-offs happen through defined steps, with automatic prompts when action’s needed. Nobody has to track down an approver or send a follow-up email to find out where something is sitting. For a team juggling multiple clients, that kind of predictability is genuinely useful.

Documents Found in Seconds, Not Minutes

Fast document retrieval might not sound dramatic, but in a BPO environment where clients can query invoices at any time, it adds up. The ability to pull a document instantly — regardless of how old it is — has made a real difference to how quickly the team can respond to client queries.

“PaperLess has made our invoice process more structured and easier to manage.”

Accounts Team, Credentia Business Processes Pvt. Ltd

Would Credentia Recommend PaperLess?

Without hesitation, according to Navneet. For any business running Sage 50 and still relying on manual invoice processes, Credentia’s experience offers a fairly straightforward argument for making the change.

The implementation didn’t involve scrapping their accounting setup or putting staff through weeks of retraining. PaperLess fitted around what was already in place — and then quietly made it a lot more efficient. The team processes the same volumes with half the manual effort, approvals are more visible and better documented, and document retrieval is no longer anyone’s least favourite part of the working day.

Sometimes the best wins aren’t the dramatic ones. They’re the ones where a team realises, a few weeks in, that they’ve stopped doing all the things that used to grind them down — and the work is getting done faster anyway.

See What PaperLess Could Do for Your Team

PaperLess integrates with Sage 50, Sage 200, Sage Intacct, Xero, SAP Business One, and Orderwise. Book a demo at paperlesseurope.com/book-demo or reach us directly at paperlesseurope.com/contact-us.