How SIT went paperless across finance and freed up 1,200 hours a year – without budget or IT resource

The Organisation

The Southern Institute of Technology (SIT) is a leading tertiary education provider in New Zealand, with 26 departments spread across the country and over a hundred staff involved in day-to-day finance processes.

We spoke with Dulari Jayasinghe, Senior Payroll & HRIS Officer, about how she went from processing handwritten invoice requests to building her own automated workflows in Flowingly – and what that meant for her team, her auditors, and her career.

The Challenge

Dulari was responsible for generating invoices based on requests from over a hundred staff across 26 departments nationwide. Requests arrived by every channel imaginable: internal mail, hand-delivered paper, emails with attachments, emails with information written in the body.

Many of the paper-based requests were handwritten A5 slips – often with just a signature and no name or email address.

“I had to go to other members of the finance team and show them – do you recognise this signature? I felt so uncomfortable when I had to disturb someone else in my team.”
— Dulari Jayasinghe, Senior Payroll & HRIS Officer

Tracking down the source of a request was only the beginning. If information was missing, Dulari had to call people, email them, or write back through internal mail. Some requests sat buried under piles of paper on managers’ desks for months before being processed. Once completed, everything was printed, filed, and archived – 20,000 to 25,000 paper documents per year, stored for seven years.

When audit time came, auditors would select 40 to 50 samples and request documentation and approvals. Finding those in the paper filing system took Dulari six to seven days of searching, scanning, and refiling – completely disrupting her day-to-day work.

The AR process was considered a small operation, so it never made it to the top of anyone’s priority list. When Dulari raised it with managers, the answer was always the same: no budget.

The Solution

The turning point came through a conversation with a colleague in IT, who mentioned that SIT was evaluating a new workflow platform – Flowingly. The fact that IT was already exploring it meant Dulari didn’t need to initiate a budget request. And because Flowingly could be applied across any department, the investment wasn’t tied to one small operation.

Dulari got the green light from her CFO and IT initially built a workflow for her. But it still required too much manual data entry — staff were retyping customer details multiple times a week. So Dulari built her own version.

“He said, ‘You can try – it’s super user-friendly.’ So I sat and I did the flow myself. And wow. It’s still working.”
— Dulari Jayasinghe, Senior Payroll & HRIS Officer

Because Dulari understood the process better than anyone, she could design exactly what was needed. She created an Excel template for common customer data, added dynamic approval routing so requests wouldn’t get stuck if someone was away, and built in a full audit trail – who initiated, who approved, and when.

The first process took about 40 minutes to build. After that, new ones took five to six minutes. The first full rollout including the management proposal, staff training, and go-live took six months. Every process after that took days.

Results

Across approximately 6,000 to 10,000 annual requests, SIT saved 1,200 hours of administrative time per year – roughly 150 working days, equivalent to more than half a full-time role.

Audit preparation dropped from six to seven days down to half a day. Instead of Dulari digging through paper archives, auditors now log into Flowingly directly and pull what they need themselves.

“They were doing my work. Because when I was doing all that, it interrupted my day-to-day work – six, seven days just finding documents, scanning them, filing them back.”
— Dulari Jayasinghe, Senior Payroll & HRIS Officer

Across the organisation, SIT now has 71 modernised processes, with Dulari having built 15 of them herself. The time she freed up didn’t just improve the finance team’s efficiency – it changed her career.

“I never realised it would free up that much time in my role. That opened doors for me to take up new tasks, be more productive, and progress in my career. Yeah, I’m sitting here because of Flowingly.”
— Dulari Jayasinghe, Senior Payroll & HRIS Officer