Sarastia's software business unit develops and provides financial and personnel management, as well as data management solutions to its municipal customers. At the core is Sarastia 365, a cloud-based system based on Microsoft Dynamics 365. In a project bid, Sarastia selected Dooap as their invoice automation solution, and it has now been in use since 2020.

"We update our customers’ master data every night in our main system. The integration of the invoice automation solution with D365 was a necessity for us. We also wanted a product with an upward development trend”, says Janne Santanen, Sarastia's business unit manager. During the cooperation, Sarastia has presented several development wishes that have since been implemented in Dooap. The continuous development of the product is important for Sarastia, Santanen continues.

Sarastia Figures

2.5M

Invoices Annually

€130M

Turnover (in Euros)

>300

Financial Management Employees

>250

Service Center Customers

Sarastia’s service center employs more than 300 financial administration experts who take care of the financial administration processes of more than a hundred Finnish municipalities and municipal companies. Currently, half a million purchase invoices are processed annually with Dooap, but this number is expected to rise to 2 – 3 million in the next few years as the number of municipal customers connected to the system increases. A prerequisite is, of course, that the customers choose Sarastia’s S365 solution.

Sarastia has received good feedback from its AP specialists about Dooap’s user interface. According to Product Manager Mika Marttila there are two important aspects to the user experience. The service center must be intuitively easy for the end-users (i.e. invoice approvers) to use, so they know how to use it correctly and how to code their invoices properly to reduce the errors. In service center processes, much of the work is correcting errors and exceptions, and reducing them - when things are done right from the start - makes the process more efficient.

Sarastia_kaupunki_risteys
Sarastia_kaupunki_risteys

Sarastia strives for the ultimate automation of the purchase invoice process, and therefore continuous development of the process is important. “We develop productized processes. We want to provide good service competitively, and our KPI is how much it costs to process one invoice,” says Janne Santanen.

Product Manager Marttila expects Dooap to become an ever-improving tool to support Sarastia's goals. “Automation is a fact of life in today’s processes,” he says. According to Marttila, Dooap creates a strong foundation for automation, and utilizing artificial intelligence takes it forward all the time. Sarastia as a service center also automates the so-called long tail, for example, with software robotics and leveraging Azure’s tools and PowerApps.

Sarastia is a proactive customer who brings new development ideas to Dooap's roadmap. “We get good service and we are being heard,” Santanen and Marttila conclude.