One of the UK’s leading private healthcare providers streamlines accounts payable, user security, and procurement processes — replacing spreadsheets and email chains with automated, audit-ready workflows.
About Bupa
Bupa is one of the leading private healthcare providers in the United Kingdom, operating hundreds of locations across the country and globally in countries including Australia, Spain, Hong Kong, and the UAE. Their UK services span private health insurance, health clinics, dental care, care homes, retirement villages, and the Cromwell Hospital in London.
Bupa’s PeopleSoft environment supports approximately 16,500 active user profiles, processing around 27,500 vouchers and 8,500 payments on a monthly basis — a large-scale operation requiring robust automation and tight financial controls.
The Challenge
Before GT eForms, Bupa relied on a combination of legacy forms software, spreadsheets, and email-based approval chains to manage key financial processes. While some processes were partially automated through a prior product, others — particularly the payment of self-employed clinicians — remained heavily manual and time-consuming.
The clinician payment process illustrates the scale of the problem. Sites around the business would collate timesheets, complete a spreadsheet, and email it to the central Accounts Payable department, copying cost centre managers for approval. Approvals came back via email. Once all relevant sign-offs were collected, AP would consolidate multiple spreadsheets into a larger master spreadsheet and then manually load that data into PeopleSoft.
The issues with this process were significant:
- No online audit trail for approvals — email approvals were filed away in folders, visible only to the AP team.
- Manual approval-level verification — AP staff ran reports from PeopleSoft and manually checked that each approver’s authority level covered the payments in their file, a process open to human error.
- Formatting inconsistencies — spreadsheets arrived from multiple sources in varying formats, causing errors during data loading.
- Late-stage data validation — combination checks on accounting entries were only performed at the point of loading into PeopleSoft, meaning errors were caught too late in the process.
- Retrospective corrections — finance teams frequently had to correct accounting entries after the fact, often around month-end.
- Constant status chasing — site administrators regularly contacted AP for payment status updates.
As Kirsty Dixon, PeopleSoft Support and Development Senior Analyst at Bupa, described it: “You can see that this was actually a really manual, probably very tedious process for everyone involved. So we took a look at this and we were like, we can definitely make improvements here.”
The Solution
Bupa went live with GT eForms in 2023 and has since raised upwards of 51,000 forms across their PeopleSoft financials environment. The team — led functionally by Kirsty Dixon (18 years at Bupa), with Christopher Livesey as Head of PeopleSoft Financials (31 years at Bupa) and Belinda Preston as Senior Software Engineer (13 years at Bupa) — has deployed forms across four key areas:
Accounts Payable — Four forms handle payments: the UK Payment Form (their most frequently used, accounting for approximately 34,000 of the 51,000 forms raised), a Hong Kong Payment Form, a Petty Cash Form for care home expenditure, and the Clinician Form for paying self-employed clinicians — their most recently deployed form.
General Ledger — Four forms allow the business to request the creation and update of Chartfield codes for accounts, departments, products, and projects, primarily used by finance and procurement teams.
User Security — Two forms manage PeopleSoft access requests. Users who need additional access beyond their base profile — such as e-procurement, finance, or approval access — submit a user profile form that is approved and signed off before access is granted. A separate technical form manages administrator-level access and production migration auditing.
E-Procurement — A form for requesting ship-to location setup, plus a new form currently in development for managing requisitioner access delegation.
UK Payment Form: 15 Templates, One Workflow
The UK Payment Form demonstrates the team’s approach to efficient form architecture. Rather than building 15 separate forms for different payment types — charity payments, compensation payments, stale-dated checks, and more — Kirsty built a single form with 15 templates controlled via a dropdown, using GT eForms’ visual ifs functionality to show and hide segments dynamically based on the selected payment type.
“I didn’t really want to be maintaining different approval definitions for 15 different form types,” Kirsty explained. “Having the 15 form types on the one form allows me to have one approval process definition. That means when we’ve configured it within the fluid approval framework, it just shows as one type — UK Payment Forms. And when we configured it within the delegation framework, it’s just one transaction type.”
The form design philosophy centres on simplicity for end users. Hidden fields and segments pull in data — supplier information, payment handling codes, accounting entries — that users don’t need to see. “If the user does not need to see it, they’re not seeing it,” Kirsty said. “I like it clean and simple for our users. I don’t want them to be getting confused.”
Behind the scenes, a custom PeopleSoft page developed by Belinda Preston allows Kirsty to configure default values for each of the 15 form types — supplier set IDs, payment handling codes, and accounting entries — which are pulled through via data pools. This architecture means that when a new payment type is needed, it can be added without technical involvement.
“Now that this form is set up, when the business comes to us and says we need a new form, we don’t need tech involvement because that tech work has already been done,” Kirsty said. “I can just put a new option in the dropdown, complete that default value page, and implement a new form quite easily.”
Clinician Form: Replacing the Spreadsheet-and-Email Chain
The Clinician Form replaced the manual process end-to-end. Site administrators now enter supplier IDs (locked to a specific set of clinician suppliers), input payment amounts into a grid, and attach supporting timesheets. The form routes dynamically for approval — first to the cost centre manager, then to finance for upfront data review, and finally to AP for sign-off against the attachment.
A standout feature is the “copy from” functionality. Recognising that many sites pay the same clinicians month after month, Kirsty built in the ability to copy supplier data from a previously submitted form. A query link embedded directly within the form allows users to look up their prior form IDs without leaving the page.
“When I was testing and building this form, I was just getting really fed up of inputting the same data over and over again,” Kirsty recalled. “I was like, if I’m getting fed up with this, then I imagine our end users will also get fed up with this. So that’s where that functionality came from.”
The form also uses dynamic approval paths: a hidden field calculates the highest payment value in the grid, and the approval chain adjusts accordingly — inserting additional approval steps when values exceed threshold amounts.
The Results
Shift from technical to functional ownership. Kirsty, who is predominantly a functional analyst, can now build, configure, and deploy new forms with minimal technical support. “I can pretty much do everything until it gets to a point of needing a data insert or views creating,” she said. “Actually implementing a new form is quite easy as long as it’s under the UK Payment Form family.”
Elimination of spreadsheet and email reliance. The clinician payment process no longer depends on emailed spreadsheets, manually consolidated files, or email-based approvals. Data flows directly from the form into PeopleSoft’s voucher staging tables, where scheduled processes build vouchers automatically.
Upfront data validation. Combination checks on accounting entries now run at the point of form submission and approval — not after the data reaches PeopleSoft. Sort codes are validated to six digits, account numbers to eight digits, and accounting entry combinations are verified before data ever reaches the staging tables. “We’re making sure that the data is accurate when it’s getting input,” Kirsty said.
Automated, auditable approvals. Dynamic approval paths route forms based on cost centre manager, payment value, and role — removing the need for AP staff to manually verify approval authority. “That team was running a report and manually checking to make sure that the role level in PeopleSoft matches the spreadsheet,” Kirsty noted. “That’s open to human error. Relying on the system to route that correctly is a great benefit.”
Enforced business processes with full audit trails. Online approvals with audit stamps replace filed-away email chains. For processes like petty cash — which follows a strict review-then-withdraw-then-approve sequence — the business can verify compliance at any time.
Reduced workload for central teams. The AP team no longer collects spreadsheets, consolidates data, troubleshoots formatting issues, or manually loads vouchers. Automated data inserts and scheduled voucher builds have replaced those manual steps entirely.
Seamless user adoption. When Bupa transitioned from their legacy forms product to GT eForms, the rollout was deliberately designed to minimise disruption. “We sort of work on a premise of no noise is good news,” Kirsty said. “When we went live with the GT eForms, we didn’t have much noise. The transition was quite seamless.”
Looking Ahead
With 51,000 forms raised and a proven architecture in place, Bupa continues to identify new automation opportunities — both from business requests and from internal analysis.
“We will be approached by the business — they’ve seen what we can do with the new framework, and they’ll say, can you take a look at this process?” Kirsty explained. “And then sometimes it’s us saying, we think this would be a good idea for you. We mock a form up, go out to the business, and ask their opinion.”
Christopher Livesey confirmed the momentum: “We’ve already got a pipeline of new functionality. As we look at different areas of the business, it’s just going to be more and more processes that we feel we can use our expertise to build a form to improve both the process, the controls, and the audit.”
Technical Implementation Details
GT eForms Configuration:
- 11 forms in production across AP, GL, user security, and e-procurement; 1 in development
- 51,000+ forms raised since 2023 go-live
- Single form family / form type architecture with 15 templates controlled via visual ifs
- Data pool integration with custom PeopleSoft page for per-template default values (supplier, payment handling, accounting entries)
- Combination edits on submit and approval buttons for accounting entry validation
- Sort code (6-digit) and account number (8-digit) field-level validation via custom code
- Hidden segments for backend data (supplier set ID, voucher type, payment handling code)
- Data insert into voucher staging tables on form execution
- Scheduled voucher build and post processes for automated payment creation
Approval Framework:
- Mixed dynamic and static approval paths
- Dynamic routing based on cost centre manager and payment value thresholds
- Role-based routing for select form types
- Integrated with PeopleSoft Fluid Approval Framework
- Configured within PeopleSoft Delegation Framework
- Hidden approval-only segments showing contextual data for specific approval teams
PeopleSoft Environment:
- ~16,500 active user profiles
- ~27,500 vouchers processed monthly
- ~8,500 payments processed monthly
- Modules: Accounts Payable, General Ledger, E-Procurement, User Security
Building photo © Chapman Taylor. Bupa Place, MediaCityUK, Manchester, UK.