Uline

The Challenge

Based in Pleasant Prairie, Wisconsin, Uline provides boxes and shipping supplies to industrial clients in North America. This $3 billion company employs more than 4,000 employees nationwide. With distribution centers in seven locations across the U.S., Mexico and Canada, they are the largest distributor of shipping, packaging and industrial supplies in the United States.

Uline previously utilized 13 employees to manually process 200,000 checks per month, entering payment information into Uline’s systems. These employees were also tasked with matching these checks with the 300,000 invoices that Uline produced each month. Management realized that the growth of Uline would make manual keying and check processing prohibitively expensive. They needed to increase efficiency without sacrificing accuracy.

The Solution

Billtrust’s automated solutions for invoicing and cash application integrated seamlessly with Uline’s enterprise resource planning (ERP) system, addressing the entire receivables process. Creating new procedures for image and data capture, remittance processing and matching, deductions and exceptions, as well as cash application, Billtrust’s solution transitioned Uline’s accounts receivable (AR) team from manual processing to a fully automated workflow.

The Results

Billtrust’s Cash Application automatically inputs paper check data with refined accuracy. Now Uline’s automatic payments match rates are at 80%, while their automatic line item match rates, before any exception handling, are consistently around 90%. This freed their AR team to process checks quickly, providing them with the additional capacity to handle an increasing volume of payments. Paper check scanning was also offloaded to the bank, allowing Uline to re-allocate employees to other departments.