FinanceNorthern Wide Plank cut inbox clutter by 80%
80%
Less emails on individual inboxes
2 hrs
Saved per agent per day
100%
Paperless billing workflow
A leading manufacturer of specialty wood flooring with over 25 years of experience, Northern Wide Plank streamlined their finance department's complex billing workflow by replacing insecure shared accounts with Drag's kanban boards.
Northern Wide Plank is a leading manufacturer of specialty wood flooring. For over 25 years they have searched the globe and sourced one-of-a-kind woods that are designed and crafted to create beautiful spaces that exceed their clients’ expectations.
Dealing with such a diverse number of suppliers scattered around the world leads to a lot of emails. The finance department has one email inbox to receive bills, packing slips, records and visa receipts, but every purchase needs to go through a complex workflow including many people with different functions within the team, like processing emails and uploading data to the ERP.
Before Drag, their team was facing several challenges juggling all the steps of the purchasing process with all the different suppliers. They needed to bring all their bills into one place. Considering the team was already collaborating in Google Workspace, they thought about sharing one account, but that would mean sharing passwords and losing visibility of individual team members’ activity. So they tested setting up a Google Group for accounts payable.
That setup had its own challenges: sharing an account’s password was a no-go, Google Groups was clunky and didn’t have status or progress tracking for to-dos, and the interface wasn’t nice.
“We appreciate anything that’s simple.”
Jamie Peebles
Director @ Northern Wide Plank
Jamie Peebles, Director, started looking for alternative solutions. He considered Asana, ClickUp, and other project management tools, but they were too complicated for just one of the company’s workflows. He then looked for solutions that used Google Groups, but they were all customer-service oriented. What he really needed was an easy-to-use visual collaboration solution integrated with Google Groups and task management oriented.
Jamie came across Drag while looking for Google Workspace add-ons and decided to run a trial with his team to manage their accounts payable workflow. Today, the Northern Wide Plank team uses Drag boards to manage their suppliers.
“What we like the most is the simplicity of having bills landing on a Kanban board to be looked after by the finance team.”
Jamie Peebles
Director @ Northern Wide Plank
According to Jamie, Drag is the perfect solution for the Northern Wide Plank team because there’s no need to get an extra app. It’s easily accessible and there’s no need for IT in the back.
Their team created a Google Groups shared inbox integrated with the accounts payable Google Group and shared it with the finance team as a board. They can easily manage the process by customizing the Kanban board’s columns to each step of the workflow with its respective owners.
The first column is “New” where they receive all emails from suppliers. The second is “Bills” for purchases that need processing. Then there’s “Packing Slips & Records” where task-cards are placed once documents are attached. The workflow continues through checking invoices for cargo, adding packing slips, adding freight receipts, uploading data to the ERP, and finally paying the supplier, each step with its respective owner.
“It is the best! Allowed our team to go paperless, we couldn’t have without it. Saves so much time and makes everything so much easier.”
TBTaylor Bailey
Office Assistant @ Northern Wide Plank
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