How Invoice Audit Automation Drove 9,900% Growth for a Utility Solutions Market Leader

A utility solutions market leader wanted to expand their cost control offerings to include waste and recycling auditing.  

With Discovery’s Audit automation for waste & recycling invoices, they achieved incredible, sustainable growth over a three year period.

The Challenge: Inadequate Tools and Processes

The utility solutions company aimed to grow its cost control business with waste and recycling invoice auditing. However, their existing systems were not capable of handling waste. They quickly realized that a human-reliant process was inadequate, lacked scalability and was prone to error.

With their existing systems + humans, they typically flagged invoice total increases greater than ~28% month over month. However, they knew a huge accuracy gap remained and knew their process wasn’t trustworthy at scale.

The company couldn’t risk harming their reputation as experts in their field, but lacked the time & knowledge to build their own system in-house.

The Solution: Discovery’s Invoice Audit Automation

Discovery’s Audit automation provided an immediate solution with accurate line-item extraction & auditing of vendor invoices, at scale.  

Discovery eliminated manual processes and allowed their sales team to confidently introduce their new service to their existing customers, who were seeking this expanded offering from their trusted utility solution provider.  

Importantly, Discovery operated behind the scenes, so that the customers experience was flawless and integrated with all of their existing customer support systems.  

The Results: Unprecedented Growth and Efficiency

Implementing Discovery’s invoice auditing automation was incredibly impactful:

• Massive Growth: The company scaled from auditing fewer than 50 invoices per month to ~6,000 per month within a 3+ year period. This incredible scalability led to a 9,900% growth rate.

• Customer Expansion: Alongside their operational growth, the company's customer base expanded by more than 1,200% in the same period.

• Cost Reduction: The cost per audited invoice was reduced by 58%, significantly improving their bottom line.

• Accuracy and Timeliness: The accuracy and on-time completion of invoice auditing became measurable and continuously improving with their operations.

The company's COO said of Discovery software: "No one else can do this with the accuracy, speed, and scale we need. Everyone else has some version of vaporware hiding a manual process."

Conclusion

With Discovery’s Audit automation, the utility solutions market leader set itself on a path of monumental growth. This case underscores the power of automation in driving efficiency and scalability in the utility solutions industry for cost control companies looking to expand their solution offerings with existing and future customers.  

For more insights into how Discovery can help your cost control company achieve similar results, explore our Discovery automation capabilities.