Automating Back Office Grunt Work is No Longer Optional - It’s Necessary for Survival

With the rise of smarter systems, you can automate the grunt work, or choose to be handcuffed to the desk by it.

For those operating gas stations and convenience stores, vendor invoices are the worst of it. After verifying that you physically received the product, the time it takes to process those invoices (assuming you’re amongst the crowd that actually cares about your inventory) is daunting. Playing around with handheld scanners, scan sheets, keying in data…it’s stupid. For many, many years now I would look at those invoices, in all their various shapes, sizes, and formats, and think to myself there must be a better way.

And it’s not just a me problem: Studies show the average worker wastes 6 to 9 hours every single week on manual data entry. In c-stores, employees burn up to 18 hours a week on low-value admin tasks. Cash handling alone can chew up 20 hours a week per store if you’re not automating it. That’s not “part of the job.” That’s hundreds of hours every year, per store, vanishing into nonsense. Pure, nonsense. These people should spending their time on countless other tasks that actually make a difference in the stores, not playing with paper in a 6’ x 10’ back office. This is what you call spinning your wheels. This work can now be automated to a large degree.

We built FileMinder for one reason, to cut the BS on this type of work. Assuming that invoice has accurate UPC data in it, you can now use FileMinder to process invoices with one step: scan the invoice into the active Drive folder. From there, our sytem IDs the document, pulls out all the data, creates a beautiful XML, EDI file ready to be imported by your back office system. No hand held scanners, no keying in quantities or prices.

The EDI files hit your back office system with everything needed to populate accurate inventory and keep you on track. Change in cost? Thats already reflected. New product? The descriptions and costs are already populated. Bottle deposits? Pssshhhh. Thats already pulled out and added as a separate line item (we can customize how it handles deposits but thats the standard).

Another thing that kills time? Dopey dashboard based systems that just gives you another passive software application to silo data in, and switch back and forth from. Thats why FileMinder prioritizes interoperability - we work where you already work: email and cloud storage. No sign-ins, dashboards, portals or exporting spreadsheets. Try us out today and get 200 pages of processing free with promo code NOBS. Let us chew through the nonsense and free up your staff to be more effective.