The productivity improvements enjoyed by Yamaha Financial Services turned into the base for a case study recently compiled by MBSi about Smart Invoicing, the service provider’s automated fee management and invoicing tool.

Yamaha Financial Services faced several challenges because the captive managed fee requests and invoicing through what MBSi described as “a maze of email.”

MBSi recapped that requests arrived by email every week and had to be checked one by one against approvals. For each invoice, that meant digging through inboxes to verify:

—The fee had already been approved by the collateral team

—The fee had already been invoiced or paid, to catch duplicates

—The amount matched the correct contracted rate, which varied by forwarder

—That supporting documentation could even be found, since records were scattered across email threads and folders.

Furthermore, Yamaha Financial Services conducted its own analysis and determined employees were spending 30 hours a month manually reviewing fees and invoices.

So, Yamaha Financial Services partnered with MBSi.

With Smart Invoicing in place, MBSi said Yamaha Financial Services auto-approves 86.6% of the invoices it receives and 88% of fee requests. Fee requests outside auto-approval thresholds were resolved within two days of receipt.

Storage fees, which used to take up to 100 minutes to review individually, are now automatically approved 85.3% of the time, according to the MBSi case study.

And since Yamaha Financial Services approves fees faster, MBSi said the captive cut days to repo by 9.2% during the first half of this year compared to the first half of 2025.

“Smart Invoicing has streamlined our invoicing and fee review process. What used to require 30 hours of work per month now takes only a few focused hours, allowing us to spend more time on vendor relationships and strategic priorities,” Yamaha Financial Services vendor management specialist James Yao said in the MBSi case study.

Yamaha Financial Services vendor specialist Cathy Benitez added, “If you’re looking for a smarter way to improve efficiency in your workflow and serve as a go-to source for reliable information, give Smart Invoicing a try.”

For more information, go to www.mbsicorp.com.