Chucking Checks

Now the vendor base is a svelte 60,000. There is only a limited check run because 86% of supplier invoices are now paid by ACH. Settling an invoice with a check is the rare exception, reports Julie Mingus, director of corporate treasury operations and disbursements. About 50 employees now handle invoices and payments, and all but 24% of invoices arrive electronically after a three-stage campaign to get suppliers to e-mail their invoices in TIFF format. 

Experts consider such a high conversion rate essentially impossible, but Dean Foods could do it because it had multiple suppliers for almost everything it bought. As the company shrunk its supplier base, in most cases only those that would agree to card or ACH payments survived. “If a supplier wouldn’t take ACH payment, we’d go to the next one on the list,” Mingus says.