Case Study: River Country Cooperative

River Country Cooperative, a 90-year-old, farmer-owned Midwest marvel, is as diversified as a county fair. Convenience stores, fuel delivery, grain mills, and even portable storage. But behind the scenes, Accounts Payable Manager Mike Sauve was wrangling a wild herd of inefficiency.

“We were drowning,” Mike admits. “My payables clerk and myself, we were probably working 10 hours of overtime every week. I didn’t see any end in sight.” The culprit? A mountain of manual paperwork, three disconnected software systems, and a backlog of 3,000 invoice emails. “There was a lot of typing, a lot of human error. Locations were printing invoices, approving them, coding them, scanning them, and then putting them into DocuWare. It was very cumbersome.”

DocuWare was in place, but as Mike puts it, “We were basically using it as a storage device. You got this iceberg and we’re barely touching the top of what it can do.” Every invoice required manual entry and approval, and the fragmented process meant errors were common, and audits were, well, less fun than a Minnesota winter. “The first year I started, there was probably a good handful of major corrections that came from keying errors,” Mike recalls.

And just when you think things couldn’t get more complicated, River Country Co-op kept growing. More locations, more vendors, more complexity. “We have about 4,000 home heat customers, 11 convenience stores, and a transport business that keeps growing. Anything office-related, I get involved in,” says Mike. “We even bought a storage box company last year. Totally different from everything else we’ve been doing.”

Enter Kelley Create. “Kelley Create solved it quickly,” Mike says. “Solutions Engineer, Zach Heser quickly laid it out: here’s what we can do, here’s how we can fix this.” In just two months, Kelley Create helped River Country automate invoice processing, customize workflows, and integrate intelligent indexing. “Suddenly, invoices were scanned, coded, and approved with minimal human touch, saving up to 40 hours a week and freeing us to focus on what really matters.”

The results? Immediate and measurable AP automation wins:

• Significant Time Savings: Up to 40 hours a week reclaimed for higher-value work.
• Error Reduction: Automation and indexing slashed manual mistakes, making audits a breeze.
• Scalability: New locations and business lines onboarded without extra admin headaches.
• Knowledge Sharing: River Country became a resource for other co-ops, training peers on the optimized DocuWare system.

Mike sums it up: “It goes beyond just payables. Kelley Create has been great. I got lucky finding Zach because the solutions help all areas of the business.”

For River Country Cooperative, Kelley Create wasn’t just a technology upgrade; it provided a lifeline that transformed operations, improved accuracy, and positioned the company for future success.