Case Study: Walsall Council achieves an 87% reduction in invoice processing time with Fraedom

Fraedom helps Walsall Council reduce invoice processing time by 87%

Walsall Council, the Metropolitan Borough of Walsall, faced costly, time-consuming processing of high-volume, low-value transactions — about 5,000 stationery invoices a year (avg £45), 25,000 temp-agency invoices and manual twice-weekly orders for 70 school kitchens — with Procure-to-Pay taking up to 30 days. After a tender the council selected Fraedom and its transaction management platform to bring visibility and control to lodge and purchasing card spend and to reduce invoice processing overheads.

Fraedom implemented lodge cards for stationery and school catering, expanded purchasing-card coding and approvals, and deployed its Transaction module to import and workflow agency invoices into Oracle, linking transactions to employee IDs and cost centres. The result: invoice processing time fell by 87% (from 30 to 4 days), c.20,000 invoices were removed from manual processing, cost per transaction dropped from £5.60 to £0.25, and Walsall realised around £100,000 annual savings plus greater spend visibility and reporting.

Walsall Council

Paul Aldridge

iProcurement Systems Support Officer