Growing autobody company, Carubba Collision, integrated their accounting software with a document management solution to optimize its accounting processes.  The results: a corporate accounting department able to meet the demands of a growing business without additional staff.

Established in 1955, Carubba Collision is the largest body shop conglomerate in upstate New York with 16 locations across 11 cities. The company is dedicated to assisting customers with insurance claims and works hard to restore its customers’ vehicles to pre-accident condition, appearance and performance. Over the last two years, Carubba Collision entered a high growth phase opening 4-6 new locations a year.

Requirements

To manage this growth, Carubba’s new Chief Financial Officer (CFO), Sean Penner, took a closer look at their existing software platforms. Since they were currently using capturing software, PSIcature by Psigen, to bring invoices into QuickBooks for processing and DocuWare, their document management software to store the invoices, it was determined that a tight integration could easily be leveraged through workflow automation and staff training.

Solution

CFO, Sean Penner, worked with his Authorized DocuWare Partner, ComDoc, to review DocuWare’s functionality and decide which features could best be utilized by Carubba. The Authorized DocuWare Partner provided hands-on training for all employees on the use of DocuWare and implemented tighter software integrations such as an “Invoice Look Up” button in QuickBooks which would take the staff directly to the needed invoice in DocuWare. They also added the “Connect to Outlook” feature which allowed the staff to easily send, receive and upload documents via email.

Benefits

“A general training on the basics of storing and searching in DocuWare and giving employees proper access, made a huge impact on employee buy-in resulting in an increase in our accounting department’s efficiency,” said Penner.

Carubba’s accounting staff was absolutely thrilled with the new work processes because it took away the tedious tasks like filing paper documents. They now have the ability to research a question and respond without ever leaving their desk. This goes a long way in improving customer service.

Today, the bulk of Carubba’s invoices arrive in paper and are scanned and automatically indexed. DocuWare is increasing employee accountability because it gives management an audit tool to review invoice accuracy. Documents are no longer filed. Carruba holds onto paper documents for 30 days, then shreds them.

Conclusion

Carubba is very happy with its DocuWare solution and hopes to expand it to its Human Resources department. As a final thought, Penner stated, “We’ve eliminated a couple of hours per employee per week by getting rid of manual, paper processes. It’s hard to quantify how many hours we’ve saved but the bigger benefit is that we’ve been able to add more stores and grow our business without adding operational costs such as more staff in accounting.”