Case Study: How St Francis Xavier College Transformed AP Efficiency with Alii 

Overview

St Francis Xavier College (SFX) is a large multi-campus co-educational catholic school in Melbourne that offers outstanding education for high school students.

With approximately 550 staff and 800 monthly invoices processed across three campuses, they aimed to undertake a digital transformation project, allowing their finance team to move beyond manual tasks and streamline their accounts payable processes.  

The Challenge

As a large multi-campus school, St Francis Xavier College would manage a high volume of invoices each year. Their finance team took the time to establish well-defined processes to stay on top of this growing workload. Still, the manual handling of accounts payable tasks made it increasingly more challenging to keep up with growing invoice volumes.  Tasks such as scanning invoices, saving files and manually entering data into their system consumed their valuable time and left little room for value-adding financial tasks.  

St Francis Xavier College also handled purchase orders and invoice approvals in complex workflows that involved staff manually scanning invoices, saving them to PDF, inserting a signature, and moving the invoice to another folder. This approach often led to bottlenecks, missed communications, and delays. It made maintaining end-to-end visibility over the school's payment cycle difficult, reducing transparency and oversight.  

The finance team knew that automation could unlock new levels of efficiency in the AP role by streamlining workflows, easing administrative volume, and reducing burden, freeing up staff to focus on strategic aspects of financial management and operations.  

The Results

Since implementing Alii, the finance team at St Francis Xavier College has transformed its accounts payable operations, achieving greater efficiency, visibility, and smoother day-to-day processes. Each year, the college processes a high volume of invoices, and previously, this volume would require a significant amount of effort, including support from an additional staff member to handle data entry.

Now, the AP Officer can manage the full invoicing workload independently, with the help of automated invoice entry with OCR technology and automatically matching POs to invoices. This frees up over 30 hours per week for more strategic and financial tasks, such as reconciliations and supplier follow-ups. Approvals that once involved long email chains are completed in just a few clicks. With a clear audit trail and mobile access, budget holders can approve invoices on the go, drastically reducing delays and ensuring suppliers are paid promptly.

With Alii's comprehensive real-time dashboard, the finance team and department heads now have complete visibility over budgets and invoice statuses. This instant access to financial data has supported faster, more informed decision-making and improved the colleges' ability to forecast accurately.  

Staff training was quick and straightforward. After just one week of training, the team felt confident navigating the Alii platform. The intuitive interface, OCR, built-in compliance features, and the ability to easily add notes or reassign invoices to other departments have streamlined processes even further.  

Why Alii

Time-Saving Automation: OCR data capture and automatic PO matching reduce manual work. 

Frictionless Approvals: One-click approvals with timestamped history improve speed and compliance. 

Clear Oversight: My Queue and visual dashboards make managing tasks and budgets simple. 

System Checks: Automated validation of ABNs, bank details, and duplicate invoices ensures data integrity.