Hankyu Hanshin Holdings Group Launches Trial Implementation of 'Bill One' to Enhance Accounting Efficiency

Sansan, Inc., a provider of AX services that transforms work styles, has announced that Hankyu Hanshin Holdings, Inc. is considering the adoption of the accounting AX service 'Bill One' for its group-wide common accounting system, which is currently being rolled out across more than 60 group companies, and has initiated a trial implementation in several core group companies.

By leveraging Bill One's new 'AI Automatic Entry' and 'Automatic Approval' features, the group intends to automate invoice payment application processes and accounting approval workflows, which are handled daily by over 5,000 employees across the group, thereby enhancing group-wide productivity.

■ Background of Bill One Adoption

The Hankyu Hanshin Holdings Group operates in six business domains—Urban Transportation, Real Estate, Entertainment, Information & Communication, Travel, and International Transportation—and handles over 500,000 invoices annually group-wide. Previously, for each invoice, field staff had to circulate paper documents or perform data entry/application tasks via internal intranets for the accounting department to process payments and accounting entries. Evolution toward more efficient procedures was necessary.

This work is performed daily by over 5,000 employees across group companies involved in payments and accounting. Regarding information on invoice line items, previous operations required staff to combine or split multiple lines based on usage and company-specific accounting rules. This work, requiring professional accounting judgment, contributed to a significant workload across the group.

Furthermore, accounting staff faced considerable time and effort verifying whether payment amounts, tax amounts, and payees (payee codes or account masters) matched invoice and internal counterparty data. Additionally, there was a demand for initiatives to enhance accounting operations, such as further homogenization and improved accuracy of application content across the group to reduce the need for accounting staff to send requests back to the field.

Consequently, to address increasing invoice processing volumes and diversifying business contents, the group pursued possibilities for streamlining and automating the entire process from invoice receipt to payment application and approval, leading to the consideration of Bill One. Currently, the group has begun trial utilization at core group companies and is considering expanding this to all group companies using the common accounting system in stages.

■ Expected Benefits After Adoption

・Improve group-wide productivity by eliminating manual field payment applications and accounting approvals

Bill One's 'AI Automatic Entry' function uses invoice line-item data and past application history to have AI automatically input application items such as amounts, tax rates, and account codes into Bill One. As a result, the Hankyu Hanshin Holdings Group expects a significant reduction in man-hours required for manual data entry for payment applications. Furthermore, automation will suppress variations in application content and errors from manual entry, reducing back-and-forth correction requests. Moreover, fixed-amount payments with identical details each month can be considered for removal from the accounting staff's verification flow. Additionally, Bill One's 'Automatic Approval' feature will enable the automation of matching payment applications with payee data, contributing to improved productivity for both field and accounting staff.

・Strengthen expenditure management by eliminating receipt of paper invoices

Bill One acts as an agent to receive not only electronic data but also paper invoices from business partners, digitizes them with 99.9% accuracy, and uploads them to the cloud. This allows field staff to eliminate tasks associated with receiving paper invoices and scanning them into PDFs, enabling unified online management. Consequently, the group expects to eliminate missing paper invoice storage, build an environment for easy online searching of invoice information, and realize smooth audit support.