Appt Corporation Ltd is a joint-venture partner of McDonald’s which currently operates 29 restaurants in North London and North West London.
The restaurants are 50 per cent owned by McDonalds and 50 per cent by Appt Corp’s Managing Director Atul Pathak. They trade as McDonald’s.
Mr Pathak took over his first McDonald’s franchise in Hanwell, West London, and now employs 1,200 staff across his Hanwell head office and 19 restaurants.

Mr Pathak has built up his successful business through attention to detail and people. He said: “For me, my business is all about people, whether they are my customers or my employees – my ‘internal customers’. My business success is based on focusing on both of these customer groups. That is what makes going to work each day such a pleasure.”

Appt Corp has to pay around 600 invoices a month, which were dealt with by emails sent back and forth between suppliers and different individuals within the company. These invoices were taking up a lot of storage space, and more staff time than necessary.

Louis Ellis, Appt Corp’s Business Support Manager, said: “There was no centralised system and we knew it could be more efficient.”

“We often had trouble when there were queries, because we had to track back what had happened to the invoices. We were searching through piles of papers to find a particular invoice. We knew we needed a web-based invoice management system that was easy to use and intuitive,” said Louis.

Intelefile is a document management solution that provides secure online access to business documents.
Documents can simply be scanned to transfer them to Intelefile’s secure data centre, where they are fully searchable online.
Appt Corp first contacted Transputec about Intelefile in November 2009 and in less than three weeks had a fully functioning service.

It allows invoices to be logged and taken through a set workflow to be verified, approved and paid.
Abraham Atsbaha, Development Manager for Transputec, said: “As with all our customers, we built Appt Corp its own secure sub-site of the Intelefile website. We also customised the system to produce management reports of what is being spent by branch or product code.”

Louis said the system was a lot more useful than had initially been envisaged. “We got all we originally wanted and a lot more,” he said. “We knew we wanted a system to store and approve invoices via a web page. It has vastly reduced the time we spend on invoices. They are being paid much sooner, so our suppliers and creditors are a lot happier with us.”

“In addition, Intelefile allows us to generate reports on how much we are spending on a particular resource. It also gives us an audit trail so we can see which individual dealt with an invoice at each stage.”

“We can also share information between users, for example to flag something up to a supervisor. It’s a very robust system.”

Intelefile has transformed the way Appt Corp deals with invoices and many other documents besides.

“It has vastly reduced the time we spend on invoices, both in the head office and the individual restaurants,” said Louis. “Invoices are being paid much sooner, so our suppliers and creditors are a lot happier with us. It also makes dealing with queries so much easier, as we can just type in an invoice, bring it up instantly and see who dealt with it. No more searching through piles of paper.”

Intelefile is used by around 50 managers and administrators at Appt Corp’s 19 restaurants and its head office.

In addition to using it for invoices, the company is able to scan and store documents such as employees’ visas and training records. It is considering using it to store payroll details in the future.

“At the moment we are only using a small part of what the system can do, so we are still developing more uses for it,” said Louis.

Louis was impressed with Transputec’s professionalism from the first contact to the ongoing support he receives.

“They were very straightforward and helpful, and got things going very quickly,” he said. “They have always been keen to talk to us and we have regular meetings to review the project. There have been very few glitches but whenever there is a problem, they deal with it by phone immediately, or send someone out if necessary.”

Abraham said: “We have had great feedback on the time that is being saved approving invoices, and Appt Corp has even recommended us to another customer.”