December 19, 2022

How Excel Importer (a Theta app) uploads thousands of invoice lines into Business Central for Hawkins Watts

Hawkins Watts Group is a food ingredient supplier with hundreds of products on its books. To fully take into account all storage costs for each product line, Hawkins Watts uses Theta's Excel Importer app to upload invoices from their third-party logistics provider. This gives their Board and team the visibility they need of their costs.

Photo credit: Calum Lewis

Hawkins Watts Group is a family-owned food ingredient supplier headquartered in Auckland, New Zealand.

When Debbie Hawkes became IT Systems and Process Manager in 2020, she noticed challenges with monthly invoicing. The accounting team received a weekly multi-page invoice from their third-party logistics provider containing hundreds of line items. This invoice was then entered manually as one summed record into Business Central, but as a result, missed detailed storage and handling costs per product range. To overcome this and provide visibility of costs per product range to the Board, the costs were manually calculated so that significant expenses such as storage could be accounted for at a product level. As with any manual process of this size, it took hours each month, and the risk of data-entry errors was high.

Debbie takes the mantra “how can we work smarter, not harder” seriously. Together with the team at Theta, she identified Excel Importer, a Business Central app made by Theta that would save them hours each month.

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Excel Importer is a massive time-saving app

Installed easily into the Hawkins Watts Business Central instance, Excel Importer allows users to upload large amounts of data into Business Central quickly.

Excel Importer is constantly improving too - removing any manual interventions is a key aim. For example, when the team at Theta heard that Debbie was modifying her files to remove redundant lines, they added this feature to the development backlog, which is now available in production.

As Hawkins Watts is a big user of Jet Reporting, the accounting team can now prepare their monthly business reports within minutes as they have the source invoices and files loaded into Business Central using Excel Importer.

Debbie comments:

Before using Excel Importer, our accounting team spent at least two days each month manually preparing Board reports with data not available in Business Central. This wasn’t sustainable in terms of time lost and potential copying errors. With Excel Importer, we’re now using this time to understand how we’re performing at a product level and a G/L level. Excel Importer allows us to work smarter.

More information on Excel Importer

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