Meridian operates diagnostic clinics in Denmark, Sweden, Norway and Finland. Eight hundred and eighty people, seventeen of them in finance, and three hundred and forty suppliers who all expect to be paid on the terms they agreed.
The situation
Four countries meant four banking relationships, and four banking relationships meant four payment runs — each with its own portal, its own file format and its own cut-off time on a different day of the week.
- A scanning bureau that returned invoice data as a CSV, three days after receipt.
- An approval matrix maintained in a document, applied by hand, by memory.
- Four portals, none of which could see what the other three had already paid.
Duplicate payments were rare but not absent, and each one took a fortnight to unpick. The bigger cost was ordinary: an invoice took nine days to get from arriving to being scheduled, which meant early-settlement discounts were theoretical and late-payment queries were a daily job for someone.
The change
Meridian did not change banks. It changed where the decision happens. Invoices now arrive directly, are matched against the purchase order that authorised them, and carry their country, currency and approver before a person sees them.
The approval matrix moved out of the document and into the rules that run the queue, which is the part the clinical directors noticed: they stopped being asked to approve things that were already within their own delegated limit.
The controls did not get lighter. They got written down somewhere that actually enforces them.
Iris Bakker · Finance Director, Meridian
The outcome
There is one payment run now, on Wednesdays, covering all four countries. Around thirty-two hundred invoices a month go through it, and two people sign it off.
An invoice is scheduled the day it arrives rather than nine days later. That has made early-settlement terms real for the first time — Meridian is taking them on about a fifth of its supplier base, which is roughly what the terms were always worth on paper.
