£115K
annual savings
Value
- £115K annual savings
- 850 hours saved monthly
- 90% reduction in training time
- End-to-end invoice processing
Accounts Payable AutomationInvoice ProcessingOther
Customer: Connells Group
Headquarters: Bedfordshire, England
Partner : SS&C Blue Prism
Headquarters: Warrington, England
Web: www.blueprism.com
Connells Group is the UK’s largest and most successful high-street estate agency and property services provider, with a finance team that processes more than 8,000 supplier invoices each month. To automate this manual workflow, the company partnered with ABBYY and Blue Prism Cloud to build an intelligent invoice processing system. The automated, AI-powered solution has freed the finance team from manual data entry and saves the company more than £9,600 per month.
Connells Group’s finance team received thousands of supplier invoices each month. Each one arrived by email, requiring someone to open attachments, read the details, extract key data, and manually enter it into the invoicing system.
As the business grew, so did the workload. Slow and error-prone manual workflows became increasingly unsustainable as scaling the team wasn’t a long-term answer. Connells needed a faster, smarter way to manage invoice volumes.
The goal was to go beyond simply extracting data from invoices to automate the entire workflow, from email intake to system entry. This required integrating multiple systems to work together from beginning to end without requiring human input.
Connells Group already had experience with ABBYY, using its legacy platform for document processing, and wanted to continue the partnership to leverage ABBYY’s latest AI document processing innovations. The team chose an end-to-end automation solution, combining ABBYY Document AI for intelligent data extraction with Blue Prism Cloud for process orchestration.
The two technologies worked together seamlessly. First, the invoices went to Blue Prism digital workers, which monitored a dedicated accounts payable inbox. The workers collected invoice attachments and logged key details before sending them to ABBYY Document AI through the Connector API.
ABBYY Document AI then classified each document and extracted and validated fields like invoice numbers and dates. That structured data with confidence scores went back to Blue Prism workers to format and enrich, adding in supplier information from JIRA before entering it into the invoicing system.
Connells Group rolled out the system with a small pilot that processed 450 invoices, then scaled to 4,500 suppliers and 8,800 invoices per month. The solution was able to process 98% unseen layouts with up to 80% field accuracy on simple invoices. Training time dropped by more than 90%, from 60 minutes to just 5 minutes per document.
The invoice processing system now saves around 850 hours per month, worth approximately £9,600 in labor costs, while scaling without additional headcount. Thanks to its success, automation is expanding to other areas of the business like mortgage services documentation.
