Case Study
Removing Complexity Across 60 Entities
How ERA Group brought one consistent accounts payable process to a franchise network spanning 60 countries
Rated 5/5 on Gartner Peer Insights
About WCG
ERA Group runs a global franchise network of more than 850 franchise business units, supported by 80 internal staff based primarily in the UK, with further teams in the US, Australia, Italy, and Spain. Historically, the business grew territory by territory, with a dedicated legal entity set up for almost every market it operates in, including UK, US, Spain, Germany, and Australia.
The Challenge: A Business Built Territory by Territory
Each of ERA Group’s roughly 60 entities had, for years, been run in isolation. Franchisees across the network used a single CRM system to record activity and calculate their monthly royalties, but once that activity reached the finance team, the process fragmented. Different people processed accounts payable for different territories, often alongside their own unrelated responsibilities.
Invoice approval was equally inconsistent. Roughly 99% of ERA Group’s invoices arrived by email, but from there every territory had its own method: some tracked approvals on a spreadsheet, some forwarded emails on for sign-off, others still relied on hard copies with a physical signature.
The Solution: One Consistent Process, Not Sixty
ERA Group’s relationship with TopSource began with accounts payable, and grew from a simple question: could one standardised process replace sixty different ones? Working with TopSource’s team, ERA Group mapped out a single mechanism for logging, routing, and approving invoices electronically, with full visibility of status at every stage, before postings flowed through to the correct ledger for each entity.
The change also simplified accountability internally. Rather than accounts payable sitting with whoever happened to cover a given territory, one relationship now sits with TopSource, freeing the wider finance team to focus on higher-value work.
The Result
Before the change, senior finance staff were routinely pulled into transactional work. A financial controller responsible for the US, for example, was also processing invoices, simply because of how responsibilities had historically been split. Standardising accounts payable with TopSource freed roughly one and a half full-time-equivalent roles worth of capacity across the team.
TopSource now processes around 1,000 transactions a month for ERA Group across its entity structure, a volume the team describes as performing exactly as expected, with minimal disruption once the process was established.
“Historically, the financial controller was dipping into transactional tasks. Now they have been able to step up and do more of the forward-looking, value-adding work, and delivering improvements in the audit process. We have been able to fully utilise senior staff on the skilled element of the job, without having to put extra staff in at the bottom to take up that capacity.”
“I would definitely recommend TopSource. It is a good solution if you do not have an automated process in place, or if you are working across various areas and need specialist expertise without having to worry about it too much. That is exactly the position ERA Group was in, with that diversification across everything we operate. TopSource helps bridge that gap and fill the resource that, for a smaller business, can be difficult to recruit for directly.”
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