Customer Reference Story
Terminal for Kids relies on easy invoice in the cloud
about Terminal for Kids
If you think “Terminal for Kids” sounds like a reception building for children at an airport, you have the wrong idea. The name is explained by the way the company was founded: as a 50 percent subsidiary of Fraport AG, the operator of Frankfurt Airport, back in 2006. However, the business of Terminal for Kids is not air travel, but childcare: The company is a non-profit organization that tends to over 2,000 children aged eight weeks to school age at various locations in the Rhine-Main region. The wide-ranging portfolio of Terminal for Kids (TfK) includes daycares and nursery schools for between 16 and 148 children, which are run as both public facilities and as company kindergartens.
Invoice processing – easy invoice in the cloud
In 2021, Terminal for Kids, a large non-profit provider of childcare facilities, needed a new system for processing incoming invoices as quickly as possible. Two dedicated employees report on how they set out to find a solution that fits in with a lean administration approach and also provides optimal support in processing invoices even when they get a bit complicated. The cloud solution from easy invoice was a perfect fit for the organization.
Terminal for Kids is all about children. The aim is to ensure the best possible development for the little ones by providing the highest possible quality of care. The company employs around 1,000 people – mainly teachers – and offers programs such as bilingual education and animal-assisted education. To support the work of the teachers, a lean but effective administration is needed for everything to run smoothly. These enablers also include Bärbel Hentrich, who joined TfK in fall 2020 and took over the management of the accounts payable department in 2023, and Simone Albert, who has been in charge of tasks such as preparatory accounting and invoice processing since April 2022.
The need for a new incoming invoice processing system
The first major project that Bärbel Hentrich tackled at TfK concerned incoming invoice processing. This was due to a restructuring that the company was undergoing. For a long time, Terminal for Kids had used the billing system of another Fraport subsidiary, but this was spun off from the non-profit company. The project was extremely urgent, but it also presented an opportunity:
“The old invoicing system was very time-consuming and complicated for us, as it was tailored precisely to the requirements of this other Fraport subsidiary, so it simply never was really practicable for us”, says Hentrich.
Another technical requirement was that the new solution had to be integrated into the existing SAP ERP system.
A short path to easy invoice
After a brief but intensive search, Hentrich and her team very quickly decided on easy invoice for SAP:
“After the first meeting with the sales team, it was already clear to us that easy might be the right partner.” Why was that? “Firstly, some providers were simply not very interested in working with a company of our size, while easy was interested in working with us from the very beginning. Secondly, we immediately liked the way easy presented itself and how motivated the people at easy were in their approach to the project.”
The next step was a joint workshop with the managed service and an IT expert from easy:
“That was great. On the first day, we examined the current status of our technology and processes. The next day, we went in and mapped out how to switch over to easy invoice for our incoming invoice processing with our needs in mind. And everything we discussed was later implemented exactly the same way.”
After the initial contact between easy and Terminal for Kids in summer 2021, the actual project started at the beginning of October 2021. Once the technical and procedural conditions had been assessed, the first steps included drawing up a specification sheet. There were also weekly project meetings:
“We actually wanted to go live with the new solution at the beginning of January, but that turned out to be wishful thinking because we also had to integrate the administration, the facilities and finally the accounting department with the personnel documents. We then went live at the beginning of Q2 2022.”
The fact that everything went so quickly was thanks not only to the commitment of those involved but also to the fact that Hentrich opted for the cloud version of easy invoice in consultation with her IT department.
Easier, faster, less effort
As a result, not only did the accounts payable department at Terminal for Kids very quickly receive a new program for processing incoming invoices, it was also able to greatly simplify the associated workflows with easy invoice and tailor them much better to its own needs. Together with the program, easy also set up an archiving solution for SAP to automatically archive all invoices so that they would be audit-proof. In the new workflow, the invoices are initially fed into easy invoice as structured data via a digital document reader. It has proven to be a great relief that this entire process step requires no manual intervention for the vast majority of invoices. Hentrich and Albert estimate that around 80 percent of all invoices now enter the system automatically.
The invoice professionals are also enthusiastic when it comes to the workflow associated with the actual incoming invoice processing. Thanks to easy invoice, the associated steps have also been greatly simplified and accelerated. Especially since easy invoice allows the entire process to be refined over time and adapted and automated to meet the needs of individual employees: For example, the program now immediately assigns the correct IBAN number, address and payment term to all creditors. When a cost center is selected, the specific persons responsible for factual approval are automatically selected. If an invoice amount exceeds a previously defined amount, the program selects the persons specifically designated for this in the approval process.
Flexible, hassle-free modifications
“I usually only make two clicks, go to the factual check and that’s all I really have to do. It is really highly optimized”,
says Hentrich, summarizing the processing of incoming invoices from the user perspective of her department. It has proven very useful that easy invoice allows users to maintain their own workflows to a large extent. After all, staff turnover is a common occurrence for an operator of such a large number of facilities. If a facility manager changes, the invoice runs in easy invoice can now be independently adapted to the new circumstances by employees in the accounts payable department.
In this context, Hentrich emphasizes as positive that even after the program was set up, it could still be customized together with easy to even better meet the needs of her department:
“If we had an idea, like ‘Oh, couldn’t we make a little change here and maybe a tweak there’, that was never a problem. All our wishes were always fulfilled.”
For example, the IT experts at easy added a fixed posting text and a fixed account for certain vendors and added a new field to the overview that shows the status “Invoice paid on” since this information was previously only visible via SAP.
A complete success for all involved
Even in a completely different area, the switch to easy invoice has also proved to be a stroke of luck. The two experienced employees report that their work for the non-profit organization is not only extremely fulfilling but also poses its own unique professional challenges:
“Educators are a completely different breed of people, who are simply more open and don’t think much about invoices and things like that. They see meaningful things for their children and want to use them in their work. This could even include things like a rental chicken for the animal enclosure at their facility,” Simone Albert says with a laugh.
The switch to easy invoice also proved to be a complete success here. The ease of use and the option to approve invoices via smartphone in a simplified user view makes collaboration with the specialists on site go even more smoothly:
“They were all delighted with the new system because now they really only have to make one or two clicks at most.”
But easy invoice has also paid off for the non-profit in economic terms: Hentrich estimates that by switching to the new software, she has saved about one full position in her department, which processes 1,300 to 1,400 invoices per month. So it’s hardly a surprise that the next joint project with easy software is already in the starting blocks: This involves switching the accounting over to e-invoicing, which – as is well known – must be implemented in Germany as of 2025.
In our collaboration with easy, we have always had all our wishes fulfilled, as long as it was somehow feasible. This has not always been my experience in other projects, I really have to emphasize that.
Bärbel Hentrich,
Head of Accounts Payable | Terminal für Kids
Simone Albert,
Accounting | Terminal für Kids