How Kiwi used Rossum to reduce time spent per document

Kiwi is one of the fastest-growing travel companies in the world, with the mission of building the first virtual global supercarrier. Kiwi offers its users the ability to find and purchase affordable travel options, acting as a broker and travel-agency-as-a-service. Since the startup was founded in 2012 under the name Skypicker, it has grown into a team of 2,600+ and has opened branch offices in nine countries.

The Challenge

Kiwi is processing a rich spectrum of invoices connected both to its operations and to its plane tickets brokerage services. A team of junior staff used to process all documents manually, but this stopped scaling for the company in the middle of its hypergrowth story. The team had to manually processall pieces of data from the PDF documents, a process which was not just time-consuming, but proved highly error prone. That was the final motivation for Kiwi to start looking for a solution.

The Solution

All invoices were processed through Rossum, which became the main operational cockpit for the finance department’s Accounts Payable staff. They used Rossum’s user interface not just to capture invoice data (both header fields and line items), but also to pair vendor and cost center records.

Kiwi’s IT Systems Engineers were able to integrate Rossum with the company’s Netsuite instance on their own, using Rossum’s published APIs and leveraging technical support to get quick assistance with engineering questions.

Impact

The project fulfilled Kiwi’s main goal of pushing down error rates and therefore reducing the number of exceptions for their accounting staff to review.

Kiwi also experienced a major reduction of manual work. The manual invoice posting process required the full-time effort of multiple junior staff for most of each month. Now, the AP team is now spending fewer than two hours per person daily. This was a huge benefit not just to the individual personnel, but also the department as a whole. With no reduction in headcount, Kiwi now leverages its team members for more advanced tasks, such as financial analysis, past due reports, credit notes, and pro-formas to boost the quality and cost-saving for budget reporting.