Case Study: Essex County Council achieves substantial savings and stronger compliance with Proactis eInvoicing

PROACTIS Einvoicing Helps Essex County Council To Maximise Compliance And Streamline Processes

Essex County Council, one of the largest local authorities in the UK with ~£930m annual spend, needed to add eInvoicing as the final link in its purchase-to-pay transformation. The council wanted to eliminate hundreds of hours of manual re-keying, improve auditability and compliance, achieve cashable savings, and onboard roughly 15,000 suppliers with varying technical capabilities — so it selected Proactis to deliver an enterprise eInvoicing solution.

Proactis implemented a scalable eInvoicing programme using system-to-system XML for large suppliers, a PO‑flip web portal for SMEs and OCR/scanning for paper invoices, plus three-way matching and automated payment for compliant invoices. The result: of ~190,000 invoices received annually, about 135,000 (≈70%) are now processed electronically, delivering “hundreds of thousands of pounds” in annual savings, a much smaller AP team, freed physical storage (over one million paper invoices), improved compliance and visibility, and enabled mobile/flexible working — outcomes driven by Proactis’ solution.

Essex County Council

Nicole Edbrooke

Head of Purchase to Pay