Equites Uses DOKKA to Cut Down on Accounts Payable Work by Over 60%
Company
Equites Property Fund is a South Africa-based real estate investment trust (REIT) company, focused on being a market leader in developing and acquiring world-class logistics assets in South Africa and the UK. Equites is the largest and the only REIT listed on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange.
Company’s mission is to provide shareholders with pure exposure to prime logistics assets. Some of their long-dated lease tenants include big international companies like DHL, Amazon, Tesco and Medtronic. In 2022, the company’s global portfolio value was estimated at approximately 1.3B USD (26.3B South African Rands).
Quick facts:
40 employees
71 income producing properties
R 16.3BNSouth Africa Portfolio Value
R 10BN UK Portfolio Value
Challenge
Equites uses MRI software to manage their books. MRI is a leading provider of innovative real estate software applications and hosted solutions that offers a range of services from property-level management and accounting to investment modeling and analytics.
Before adopting DOKKA, Equites’ accounts payable process was completely manual. With 2 payment runs a month and around 200 invoices per payment run, the team was processing around 400 invoices per month manually.
Their AP workflow was to print every single invoice that came through the mailbox, sort it by payment date and by property, and then enter it manually into the MRI system before the next payment run. Translated into days, it used to take them a whole week to prepare and enter invoices for a payment run.
The Equites finance team knew that their way of capturing invoices is completely unscalable. They were faced with a choice: hire 4 more people to support the growth or to find an automated solution.
Luckily, their team is quite young and tech savvy, and opted for the latter.
Solution
The saying “good planning is the halfway to success” turned out to be very true for Equites. The whole team was involved in finding the new automation tool, and with high expectations at that.
Ultimately, one of their business partners recommended DOKKA as a potential solution, however they now had the second issue at hand – can DOKKA integrate with MRI?
At the time, DOKKA didn’t have a ready-made integration with MRI, so our developers were quick to jump at this opportunity and build that feature in. Coupled with our customer success team and concierge service, the integration went quickly and smoothly and Equites was ready to grow in the matter of weeks.
Today, the finance team at Equites primarily uses DOKKA to capture invoice data and speed up their payment runs. Their workload is reduced dramatically as DOKKA is automating both the capturing of invoice data as well as the bookkeeping entry creation.
Partly thanks to eliminating manual and redundant work, Equites was able to grow their finance team to 10 people, with 4 employees actively working with DOKKA every single day.
DOKKA processes approximately 1,000 invoices per month for Equites, ensuring higher data accuracy and a happier team overall.
Biggest Wins
“Working with DOKKA’s technical and support team was quite seamless, they kept us up to date of where we were in the integration process, and after we started using DOKKA they would often check with us to see how it’s going or set up a meeting to catch up, which you quite value as a customer. DOKKA’s interested in how you’re using the system and how they can improve it.”
- Nasreen Mukuddem, Head of Finance at Equites
- Nasreen Mukuddem, Head of Finance at Equites Property Fund Ltd
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