Dominion Salt
INDUSTRY:
Manufacturing
COUNTRY:
New Zealand
ERP:
NetSuite
Solution
AP automation
Background
Dominion Salt is a New Zealand salt producer and part of the Cheetham Salt group. Founded in 1948, the company has been operating for over 75 years and is the Australasian market leader.
Dominion Salt supplies salt to a large base of distributor and reseller customers, and in some cases packages product on their behalf. The business is inventory-heavy, which makes purchase-order accuracy and three-way matching (PO, goods receipt, invoice) central to how its finance operations run.
Dominion Salt’s Accounts Payable function is a small, close-knit team consisting of one controller and one fixed term contractor with support from Finance team when required – processing on average 900 invoices a month.
Dominion Salt came into contact with SmartUi through Annexa, Dominion Salt’s NetSuite implementation partner. Dominion Salt did not yet have NetSuite live when SmartUi was first scoped as the automation layer for Accounts Payable.
The challenge
An AP system that couldn’t handle 80% of invoices
Dominion Salt was running an antiquated, decade-old AP automation software that could not support roughly 80% of the invoices received each month. That 80% was concentrated in two vendor invoice types – freight invoices from Wairoa and container invoices from Visy – both with unique, non-standard formats that made them impossible to process with a typical AP automation tool.
Each invoice is linked to a sales order, as materials are procured each time an order is processed for a customer:
The freight invoices had 80–100+ line items per invoice, often around NZ$20,000–30,000 in value. Every delivery appears as two lines: a salt product/tonnage line and a matching freight (FAF) line. The sales order number was buried inside a free-text description. Staff had to manually extract the SO number, mathematically combine the product and freight lines, and key the result into NetSuite, repeated up to 100 times on a single invoice.
Containter invoices: each line contained multiple container numbers, around 5 to 50 per line, each requiring an individual charge to be calculated, balanced, and manually keyed into NetSuite.
A single freight invoice previously took well over 30 minutes to process by hand – some described it as taking a full morning’s keying.
Slow reconciliation
The underlying business problem went beyond data entry: freight costs are initially accrued as estimates at the point of sale and only reconciled to actual cost once the freight invoice arrives.
No visibility of true margins
Given that reconciliation was slow and manual, Dominion Salt often didn’t see true freight costs, and therefore true margin, until weeks after the fact.
With invoice volume steady-to-growing at ~900/month, the manual model could only scale by adding headcount or overtime as complexity increased.
Key-person risk
A small AP team was carrying heavy tacit knowledge of bespoke freight and container calculations – a key-person risk. And there was no obvious way out: doing nothing meant staying on a decade-old process nobody could extend.
"We process approximately 2,000 orders every month, and SmartUi’s Sales Order Automation has cut our processing time by 80%.
What previously took five minutes per order now takes just one. That’s more than 130 hours saved every month.
As a production business managing large order volumes, this sales order automation has proved to be a gamechanger for operational efficiency.."
Michael Karton
Retired CFO
Dominion Salt
Why SmartUi
Dominion Salt investigated several AP automation options before finding SmartUi. Two other vendors had already assessed the freight and container invoices and concluded they couldn’t meet the requirement. They only handled standard, structured invoices (a simple line item with description, quantity, unit price and total). Dominion Salt’s invoices didn’t fit that mould: they needed free-text SO-number extraction, line-combination logic, and per-container cost calculation.
The new solution had to be flexible enough to be custom-configured around Dominion Salt’s specific, non-standard invoice formats – not just process invoices but understand the freight and container logic behind them.
SmartUi was the only vendor able to customize its extraction logic to the level Dominion Salt needed. SmartUi could be configured to handle the freight and container complexity that had defeated every other option.
The implementation
Because Dominion Salt’s requirements were bespoke, implementation began with structured design workshops. SmartUi used a four-pillar framework – how documents come in, how they’re extracted, how they’re validated, and how they’re exported – to walk through AP automation in general before flushing out what was unique to Dominion Salt specifically. Annexa, the NetSuite implementation partner, was closely involved throughout.
SmartUi supported Dominion Salt through this by staying closely engaged well past go-live, and rolling out a series of enhancements and change requests to keep streamlining the process as issues surfaced.
SmartUi in daily use
- Automated extraction on freight and container invoices.
- Automated statement uploads – previously not done at all, now handled automatically so records stay current
- Automated bank-account reconciliation of invoices against vendor records – previously a fully manual, eyeball-every-invoice exercise at each month end. Automating this has also surfaced incorrect bank account details that had gone undetected under the old process.
- Automated goods-receipting workflow: when a purchase order is missing a goods receipt, SmartUi automatically emails the PO requester rather than requiring AP staff to chase it manually.
Perhaps most importantly, automation shifted the AP team’s role from data entry to data validation.
With less time spent keying invoices, staff have more capacity to question and catch issues like duplicate purchase orders, incorrect bank details. That had previously gone unnoticed.
95% faster processing
Improved operations
Real-time visibility
The results
Automating the impossible
The clearest win is that the invoices nobody else could automate – the freight and container invoices making up 80% of monthly volume – are now processed automatically end to end, from extraction through payment matching.
95% faster processing
According to Dominion Salt’s usage analytics, average AP processing time has fallen from over 30 minutes per invoice under the fully manual process, to roughly 6 minutes early in the SmartUi rollout, to about 1.6 minutes per document today.
Dominion Salt is more complex than average because of freight invoices with 100–200 lines each – that is a big achievement.
At the time Dominion Salt selected SmartUi, over 600 purchase orders sat pending receipt at once – a proxy for how much manual goods-receipt chasing was happening under the old process. The automated goods-receipting workflow, rolled out as part of a later change request, has since reduced that manual burden significantly.
Real-time visibility
Faster, more accurate freight-cost reconciliation means Dominion Salt now sees the true cost of a sale much closer to real time, rather than weeks later – giving the business a genuine chance to react to cost overruns while they’re still actionable, rather than discovering them after the fact at month-end.
Ability to uncover operational bottlenecks
The shift from data entry to data validation has also changed how the AP team works day to day, surfacing duplicate orders, SKU mismatches and incorrect vendor data that had previously gone unaddressed, and giving Dominion Salt visibility (via PO-requester reporting) into exactly where process bottlenecks sit.
