Case Study: Capita achieves over 70% reduction in invoice processing costs with Tungsten Automation

Capita Cuts Over 70% Off the Cost of Processing an Invoice

Capita Group plc, a FTSE top‑50 provider of business process outsourcing and professional services, faced a labour‑intensive purchase‑to‑pay operation that relied on manual keying of paper invoices into SAP, caused late payments and high error rates, and cost around £8 per invoice. The company set out to centralise its inbound invoice handling, implement a new SAP ERP and shared services centre, and reduce processing costs and supplier friction.

Capita’s CDIS team, together with Tungsten, implemented high‑volume scanning with ReadSoft Invoices OCR and Tungsten Process Director integrated with SAP, enabling automated capture, validation, PO matching and electronic workflow. The result: same‑day availability of scanned invoices, stronger controls and fewer duplicates, processing of 400,000+ invoices a year, a drop in per‑invoice cost to just over £2 (≈70% reduction), a reduction of back‑office headcount from 40 UK staff to 20 in India, and savings in excess of £1 million per year with ROI on scanning in the first year.

Capita

Steve Long

Project Team Lead