Eyewear Retail - Casestudy

About the company

Driven by the fact that millions of people in India need sight assistance but don’t have access to it, they started in 2010 with the idea of making eyewear accessible.

What fuelled the ideation were alarming numbers – 153 million people in India need prescription glasses but don’t have access to them; while the country needs 40,000 optometrists, there are only 8,000.

Since then, They have become a business with stellar growth that helps it reach over 1 lakh customers a month through all its operational channels (online and offline). They have pioneered the concept of the “Home Eye Check-up Service,” where people can get their eyes checked from the comfort of their homes.

They have been grappling with invoice management issues, causing a cascade of delays in the downstream processes. Hubler’s assistance was required to create a solution that would help them streamline their invoicing processes.

The Process

Managing the payment of over 1,500 invoices a month is a challenging task in and of itself, especially when it involves multiple touchpoints by multiple professionals.

They operated on a strict policy of invoice clearance that required the finance representative to clear the amount within the first 7 days of receipt - whether or not the actual invoice was received (in which case, they cleared the amount according to its charts).

There were inherent and iterative problems with this process:

Landlords raised invoices through email. The concerned professional would then tally this invoice with the company books, which took about 5 minutes for each invoice.
In case an invoice wasn't received on time, the professional would still release the payment while waiting for the actual invoice. As soon as the invoice arrived, the professional would execute the tallying process again - verifying the payment that had gone out with the amount on the invoice, correcting errors, book entries, etc.
They ended up investing an excess of 88 working hours trying to set the invoicing clocks right - which wasn't really ideal, considering that their strict policies required all the payments to be cleared within 7 days of receipt

The numbers reflected that a better solution was needed to help eliminate the tallying iterations, raise invoices on time, keep track of the status of each invoice, and ultimately help reduce turnaround times.

Hubler's no-code solution demonstrated immense promise in the niche through its capabilities of creating a universal, standardized, and easy-access platform that could bring all the touchpoints together and catalyze seamless information exchange.

The Challenge

It was a monumental effort to manage their landlords’ invoices and have them paid within the timeline. One of the major contributing factors to this delay was the lack of invoices themselves – there were already delays in receiving them from the landlords.

Adherence to timelines became exceedingly tough, and the delays began to impact subsequent internal processes.

Not only were they dealing with delayed invoice payments, but also unrealistically increased invoice processing turnaround times (TAT). This led to a plethora of offshoot problems associated with invoice processing TATs. They then had to deploy precious manpower to speed things up – something that was already facing a constraint.

Everything culminated in making the invoice processing task painstakingly slow, cumbersome, and fraught with manual tasking.

An effective digital solution was thus needed that had the capability to bring everything together and iron out the creases, helping them reduce the time invested in invoice management and processing.

The Hubler Solution

Hubler stepped up to the challenge and offered the company a well-rounded solution through its no-code platform. A customized app was developed that had the capability and functionality to make the invoice delivery, processing, and payments come together as a unit on a single digital platform.

The digital invoicing workflow that Hubler designed for them on its no-code solution was as follows:

Invoice Submission

Hubler created a digital platform that enabled prompt receiving of invoices as simple as 1-2-3 for the client and the landlords.

Simply by accessing this platform, the landlords could upload their respective invoices onto the system, updating the receipt instantly across all connected devices. This ensured that they were in possession of due invoices in a timely fashion.

Landlord Payment Management

The Hubler solution provided the functionality to enable them to verify the invoices on the platform itself and process them further without requiring much investment of manpower.

If a mismatch or discrepancy was observed during the processing, the platform also had an escalation matrix incorporated into it that enabled them to forward it to the Business team.

Payment Tracking

Owing to the many invoices coming in, it was easy to lose track of payments. The Hubler solution solved this problem by embedding a payment tracking function into the application.

They now had a full view of every invoice that entered their systems – right from receiving invoices to ensuring they were paid off, tracking the pending ones while archiving the ones wrapped up.In case a deadline was closing in, the Hubler platform was also equipped to send out reminders and alerts to get attention.

The Impact and Hubler Value

Hubler’s no-code solution was able to help them drastically reduce their invoice processing time and consequently bring down the turnaround times (TAT) to realistic levels.

Additionally, the solution eliminated the delays in invoice receiving completely, regardless of whether or not the landlord mailed it. All they had to do was to upload the document onto the Hubler platform and done. This helped minimize errors from the landlord-end.

Additionally, the Hubler solution was also equipped to provide them with invoice reports on demand, summarizing the entire ecosystem to give them a view of the complete invoicing processes for a particular term or period.

How this leading eyewear retail chain uses Hubler to optimize their Lease management system