The Salvation Army: Every automated invoice feeds someone in need

Automating and streamlining AP processes in the finance department can lead to significant savings. For most organizations, this improves the bottom line. For The Salvation Army, it translates directly into more resources for providing meals, care, and support to those in need.

From left: Daniel Karlsen, CCO at Semine, Inger Tronerud, Partner Lead at Semine, Martin Kravik Solheim, Assistant Finance Manager at The Salvation Army, Lise Luther, Property Manager at The Salvation Army, Azad Gake, Partner - Digital at BDO, Brede Tvedt, Advisor at BDO, Bjørn Røsten, CEO at Semine.

The Salvation Army is a name many of us recognize. However, not everyone knows just how large the organization truly is. With around 2,000 employees and over 6,000 volunteers nationwide, it is one of Norway's largest charitable organizations, boasting an annual turnover of over NOK 2 billion. Yet, it remains one of the most frugal.

Inspiring efficiency

- What inspires me most about working at The Salvation Army is the difference we make for so many people, from those standing in food lines to those in elder care,” says Martin Kravik Solheim, Assistant CFO. Efficient AP automation isn't just about saving money; it's about maximizing the impact on society’s most vulnerable. For them, efficient operations aren't about putting more money in the owners’ pockets—it’s about what more they can achieve out there

– Every krone saved through our automated accounts payable process means more resources for essential services. The question is whether the soup pot should be empty after serving the 28th person, or if it should stretch to feed everyone in line, Solheim explains. This makes it crucial for their administration to operate with the highest efficiency, focusing on reducing costs through automation.

Replace or rethink?

When a finance team member recently retired, the question arose: should they replace the person or rethink the entire approach? Solheim and his team spent a lot of time exploring what they could achieve with different AP automation solutions and new technology, ultimately deciding that the SEMINE platform best met their needs.

What lies under the hood of this software offers great potential to achieve what we need.

- Our goal isn’t to replace people but to move away from manual entry and repetitive tasks, and toward something that can improve data quality, assist with data analysis, and support the organization’s mission, Solheim explains.

The finance department handles around 100,000 invoices annually and has already reduced staffing from five to four. Moving forward, they want to rationalize one more full-time position, saving between NOK 1.5 to 2 million. Some of the freed-up resources will likely go toward analysis, but at least the organization won’t incur new costs.

We’ve made significant efforts to streamline the finance department recently, and we've received great help from BDO, who are both a SEMINE partner and our support on the technology side. They’ve helped us reintroduce Xledger in a way that saves us 7,000 to 8,000 work hours each year. Now, as we expand with the use of SEMINE, which has a turnkey and well-proven integration with Xledger, we expect this to create ripple effects far beyond the finance department, says Solheim.

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Transforming regulatory challenges into strategic insights

One of the things The Salvation Army aims to analyze is how they handle procurement.
With the Transparency Act, sustainability reporting, and other new requirements, everything has become much more complicated in just a few years. We rely on having a system with a strong analysis engine to meet these demands.

- When we can use data captured from SEMINE in other systems, we achieve things that would have been impossible with a standard AP automation system, says Solheim.

The regulatory burden is one side of the equation, but another is that it can provide the organization with valuable—and potentially very cost-saving—insights into their operations. Inger Eek Tronerud, Partner Lead at SEMINE, notes that this often creates significant efficiencies within organizations:

- It’s becoming increasingly important to have data available to conduct good analyses and understand where the organization can improve efficiency—particularly in procurement.

The Salvation Army and our other customers use SEMINE not just for its artificial intelligence but because it’s a platform that helps them achieve their goals, streamline operations, simplify approval processes, and gain better insights, says Tronerud. (Pictured below with Martin Kravik Solheim, Assistant Finance Manager at The Salvation Army, and Azad Gake, Partner - Digital at BDO)

Scaling up

- SEMINE has functionality that more traditional invoice management systems don’t address, such as artificial intelligence (AI) for extracting line-level data points and information from other parts of the invoice.

This added value was decisive for me in choosing SEMINE because the solution makes it easier for me to meet legal requirements, collect the right data, and document decisions and allocations. It’s very cost-effective to have a system that handles this,” says Solheim.

READ MORE: How efficient is actually your invoice processing?

It’s not just that our office work becomes easier—‘the warm hands’ working in the field with vulnerable groups in elder care, child welfare, and other areas also benefit. They need simple routines, good apps, efficient invoice processing, and other tools that simplify their work, allowing them to spend more time helping those who need it most,” he adds.

- We needed to see how the system worked in practice, and we received great support from SEMINE and BDO.

We are, after all, an ordinary organization with regular, salaried employees, but we also have thousands of volunteers with various administrative roles. Things must be user-friendly, says Solheim.

The Salvation Army has a large number of elderly volunteers who dedicate much of their time to voluntary work. It’s challenging to get 700 people to switch to something new, no matter what it is. Anything I have to multiply by 6-700 becomes expensive, and if something is cumbersome, we also risk it taking time away from someone who might have needed help that day, he says.

Seeing huge potential

Solheim mentions that he has had regular contact with representatives from SEMINE every year since he started his position four years ago.

As a large player in the non-profit sector, we have specific needs. VAT compensation is one example; another is the various grant schemes across state and municipal levels. For instance, our auditor issues 60-70 special attestations annually just for donation funds.”

All this means we need very high precision in how costs are split, allocated, and controlled, and we look forward to getting a lot of help from SEMINE in this area.

- Given how the solution uses artificial intelligence (AI), we will extract much more data from our invoices while introducing more intelligence and automation into the process!

SEMINE’s responses on how they could help The Salvation Army became slightly better and more concrete each year, and now the time was right.

The potential of the SEMINE platform, and the ecosystem it supports, is very promising and exciting for us in the future.

But what primarily set SEMINE apart from competitors was that they were already set up. Others said, ‘Yes, in the next 2-3 years we will...’, but SEMINE was already there.

- Our feeling is that they are a couple of years ahead of many others in the industry, says Solheim.

Excellent results already

The Salvation Army has been using SEMINE since May 2023 and is well on its way in its automation journey. The results after just a few months have exceeded expectations. The Salvation Army’s kindergartens already have a very high degree of automation, and we see that for the dimension values that SEMINE applies to the item lines, 90% of the suggestions are correct.

Solheim is particularly impressed with how quickly SEMINE has automated their electricity bills. The Salvation Army receives around 300 electricity invoices per month, and processing them was a significant task that has now been automated away. We always expect some teething problems in such projects, so overall, expectations have been fully met so far.