Savills UK streamlines post with Postworks
“Sending out invoices on time is essential for our landlords’ businesses, but it was costing us significant time and money. Now, we can send accurate invoices in seconds, with complete visibility over the entire process.” – Joanna Kieryluk, Central Finance Billings Team Leader, Savills UK
About Savills UK
Founded in 1855, Savills is one of the world’s leading property agents, offering property owners a variety of best-in-class services. One of those services is property management finance, including the processing of invoices, credit notes and remittances for tenants and landlords.
Case study snapshot
The challenge
- Time-intensive postal process hindered productivity
- Folding inserting machine consistently failing
- Sending financial documents from 30 billing systems, with varying templates and complex workflows
The solution
- PostboxCloud™ – cloud based platform for sending letters
The results
- Significant time-savings across the department
- Ability to add attachments real-time (like specific terms and conditions dependent on the recipient i.e. Residential vs Commercial)
- Adding letterheads only to templates that required them on-the-fly
- Complete visibility and control over the post sent
Challenge
Working in one of the world’s leading and busiest property agents, you can’t afford to be wasting time, which is why Savill’s Central Finance Billing team needed to address its postal problems.
The Central Finance Billing team processes over 4,500 invoices, credits notes, and remittances every month. This process involved working with nearly thirty client systems, printing letters on headed paper, manually attaching documents, feeding everything through the enveloping machine, and then franking the finished product.
Over a quarter, the team spent an average of 60-minutes per day processing post – and that was on a good day. The enveloping machine was used by other departments and would often break down, requiring the whole team receiving a stack of paper and envelopes to fold and envelope documents manually – costing more time and hindering productivity further.
“I had major concerns about not having control and switching to digital. We have processes in place here to make sure things are completed in the right way.” – Joanna Kieryluk, Central Finance Billings Team Leader, Savills UK
“You also have concerns about upfront costs and whether something will work but we didn’t have that with Postworks because there weren’t any set up fees” – Neil Unsworth, Head of AR – Property Management
Solution
Joanna Kieryluk (Central Finance Billings Team Leader) and Neil Unsworth (Head of AR – Property Management) began looking for a service that could save them time and money when processing and posting this significant volume of mail.
They agreed to a one month trial with Postworks and once they started using the system, they started seeing they had a higher level of control than before.
The setup took just a few hours. Joanna gave Postworks all of the templates and Postworks set everything up for them so the system was live and ready to be used.
“From the first template it was a life changer and we’ve never looked back. I haven’t seen the folder inserter in ages!” – Joanna Kieryluk, Central Finance Billings Team Leader, Savills UK
Now, the billings team can send all outgoing mail via Postworks, with all processing, printing, enveloping and posting completed for them. The system also automatically recognises a residential invoice that requires an attachment, or a system-generated invoice that needs a Savill’s logo, and automatically adds them.
Results
The primary benefit for Savills is the time saved processing post. They no longer need to add attachments or fold and envelope letters manually, and they can happily accept and meet a last-minute request from clients, which is always useful where cash flow is involved.
The visibility and control over their entire postal function is significantly better than previously, thanks to Postworks’ preview screens and proof of postage functionality.
“I’m super happy. You do all the hard work for us and turn it into a five second job. I’m pro Postworks, you’re so quick, I never have issues with lost post, and I can do more things because I don’t have to do it anymore. I love it!” – Joanna Kieryluk, Central Finance Billings Team Leader, Savills UK
Importantly, Postworks handles the complexities of Savills’ various systems and works with the layout of different invoices to print and attach documents ready for posting. It gives the Central Finance Billings team an efficient and effective solution that makes their lives easier and more efficient. They didn’t have to change a single thing on their templates for it to work.
Whether you’re generating thousands of letters each month, like Savills, or have simpler postal needs that make fulfilling them in-house expensive, Postworks has the tools to help.
