To optimize its invoice processing, Bakker Barendrecht, a subsidiary of Greenyard, uses matching software from the Basware Invoice Lifecycle Management platform. This enables the produce company to achieve a matching rate of nearly 70 percent in a dynamic market. “With e-invoicing, we aim to further increase this matching rate in the coming years,” said Sonny Liebeek, head of the Financial Control department at Bakker Barendrecht.
As part of the global produce group Greenyard, Bakker Barendrecht is part of a unique supply chain. Within this chain, the produce company acts as a strategic partner to a single, fixed buyer, working together with a fixed network of growers. This unique one-on-one collaboration between growers, Bakker Barendrecht, and the buyer is based on long-term relationships and trust, explains Sonny Liebeek, who has headed the Financial Control department for the past two years.
“As a family-owned business, we believe in a stable, closed supply chain. All participants in the chain have complete confidence that this approach delivers the best results for everyone.” In addition to ensuring that the quality of fresh produce reaches the highest level through this vision, Liebeek says it also offers economic benefits. “Thanks to these close relationships, growers can be certain that we’ll purchase their product every year. And we work together to ensure consistent quality and availability.”
“Together with 4CEE, we’re making the matching process lean and mean.”
All in all, Bakker Barendrecht receives 150,000 invoices per year from suppliers. Each invoice corresponds to a truck or shipping container filled with pallets. So if a grower delivers five trucks at once, Bakker Barendrecht receives five invoices—one for each truck. That sounds straightforward, but there are regular discrepancies, Liebeek explains. “That’s inherent to the dynamic fresh produce sector in which we operate.”
To ensure everything runs accurately and in an organized manner, Bakker Barendrecht uses Basware’s matching software to quickly detect any discrepancies and update them in the invoice processing workflow. To optimize the matching process, the produce company has been working with 4CEE for several years. “Together with 4CEE, we’ve been working intensively over the past year to streamline the matching process,” says Liebeek. “We started at the drawing board. There, we mapped out a diagram of the software and identified the inefficiencies in the software code we had been using up to that point.”
“We brought the customization of the matching software back to the standard as much as possible.”
Liebeek explains that the interaction between 4CEE and himself was one in which the 4CEE consultants contributed their knowledge and experience with the Basware software, while he more or less played the role of “devil’s advocate.” “I asked questions like: Why are we actually doing this this way? If the answer wasn’t clear to me, I asked them to explain why we were doing it that way anyway. Step by step, through this approach, we improved the matching process, making it more transparent. In this way, we essentially ‘scaled back’ the matching software by reducing the customizations wherever possible, which led us back to the standard version with customizations only where necessary.”
“In our matching process, costs and quantities are the most important categories.”
Once the purchase order has been created, the shipping order follows, with the location and pickup times for the products clearly specified. The packing slip is followed some time later by the grower’s invoices. “The invoices and purchase orders, which we import from our ERP system, are then consolidated in Basware, after which we perform the matching at the header level—that is, using total amounts. If the total amount on the invoice matches the total amount on the purchase order, the matchingis successful, ”Liebeek explains. Any mismatches end up in a “manual matching queue” within Basware, as Liebeek describes it. “An Accounts Payable employee will then investigate why the matching failed.”
“E-invoicing will offer us opportunities to improve our matching rate”
Because line-item matching between an invoice and a purchase order requires having the same information on both sides—such as item details—or being able to map between the two line items, matching at the header level is the best that can be achieved, according to Liebeek. Although he considers line-item matching at the detail level desirable, he realizes that this is difficult to implement in practice; the information required for this is too complex to obtain. For that reason, he embraces e-invoicing, because digital invoices contain XML (Extensible Markup Language) code that always includes the same fields, the same information, and—via UBL (Universal Business Language)—the same standard structure. “The number of e-invoices we currently receive on an annual basis accounts for 42 percent of all invoices,” Liebeek explains. “That figure is high because we also do business in Belgium, where e-invoicing will be mandatory starting January 1, 2026. Due to an EU directive, the Netherlands won’t follow suit until 2030, but we expect this percentage to rise significantly in the coming years, and we’re preparing for that. However, it is still too early to make the switch to processing matching via e-invoicing; the 42 percent figure is still too low for that.”
Finally, Liebeek sheds light on the impact of AI on the work of financial administration departments. He believes that AI will have a major impact on this area and that many changes are on the horizon. “We’ve been using robotics for a while now to perform simple tasks, and that works fine as long as no decisions need to be made. When combined with AI, those decisions do become possible, allowing them to perform somewhat more complex tasks together. Of course, these are tasks that an employee can perform just as well, but AI does it faster and is also available 24/7. What’s still needed, then, is robust governance where we have to answer questions such as: where is it allowed, and where isn’t it? And where is a final ‘human in the loop’ still needed to perform the final check?” Furthermore, Liebeek is working in his department on developing an AI application to categorize incoming emails by priority and generate draft replies using AI. “I believe this is the future, because AI can perform these tasks exceptionally well, allowing employees to focus on tasks that add more value. And that only makes the work of our people in the department more enjoyable and interesting,” he concludes.