If you’ve ever managed a payment process that relies on spreadsheets being emailed back and forth, approvals tracked in inboxes, and data manually loaded into your ERP — you know the feeling. It works, technically. Until it doesn’t.
Bupa, one of the UK’s leading private healthcare providers, knew that feeling well. With hundreds of locations across the UK and operations spanning Australia, Spain, Hong Kong, and the UAE, their PeopleSoft financials environment processes roughly 27,500 vouchers and 8,500 payments every month. Some of those payments were running through a process that, by any measure, was overdue for a rethink.
In a recent Gideon Taylor Lunch and Learn webinar, Kirsty Dixon — PeopleSoft Support and Development Senior Analyst at Bupa — walked through exactly how her team replaced one of their most painful manual workflows with GT eForms, and what three years of building forms across the organisation has taught them.
The Spreadsheet-and-Email Problem
The process in question was the payment of self-employed clinicians across Bupa’s health clinics. It was time-sensitive — contractual agreements meant payments couldn’t wait — and it involved a lot of moving parts.
Here’s how it used to work: a site administrator would collate timesheets, fill out a spreadsheet, and email it to the central Accounts Payable team, copying cost centre managers for approval. Approvals came back by email. Once AP had collected all the sign-offs, they’d consolidate multiple spreadsheets from various sites into one master file and manually load it into PeopleSoft.
The problems were layered. There was no online audit trail — email approvals were filed away in folders, invisible to anyone outside the AP team. The AP staff had to run PeopleSoft reports and manually cross-check that each approver’s authority level actually covered the payment amounts in their file. Spreadsheets arrived from different sites in inconsistent formats, causing errors during loading. And accounting entry validation? That only happened at the point of loading into PeopleSoft — meaning errors were caught far too late.
“You can see that this was actually a really manual, probably very tedious process for everyone involved,” Kirsty said. “So we took a look at this and we were like, we can definitely make improvements here.”
That turned out to be an understatement.
Building on a Proven Foundation
Bupa didn’t start with the clinician form. They went live with GT eForms in 2023, initially migrating existing forms from a legacy product onto the new framework. Their UK Payment Form — used for ad hoc payments like charity and compensation payments — was one of the first, and it set the pattern for everything that followed.
What’s remarkable about that form is the architecture. Rather than building 15 separate forms for 15 different payment types, Kirsty built a single form with a dropdown selector, using GT eForms’ visual ifs to dynamically show and hide fields based on the payment type selected. One form, one approval process definition, one delegation configuration.
“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.”
Behind the scenes, a custom PeopleSoft page (built by Senior Software Engineer Belinda Preston) lets Kirsty configure default values — supplier information, payment handling codes, accounting entries — for each payment type. Those values initialise through data pools, so the end user never sees the complexity.
“If the user does not need to see it, they’re not seeing it,” Kirsty said. “I like it clean and simple. I don’t want them to be getting confused.”
This foundation — one form family, hidden segments, data pool-driven defaults — meant that by the time the team turned their attention to the clinician payment process, the technical groundwork was already in place.
Replacing the Manual Process
The new Clinician Form works on a different model than the standard UK Payment Form. Where the payment form creates one voucher per form, the clinician form creates multiple vouchers from a single submission — one for each clinician being paid.
The workflow is straightforward. A site administrator enters their department code, selects the clinician suppliers from a locked-down set of IDs, enters payment amounts in a grid, attaches the supporting timesheets, and submits. The form routes for approval — first to the cost centre manager, then to finance for upfront data review, and finally to AP to verify the form data against the attachment. Once fully approved, the data inserts directly into PeopleSoft’s voucher staging tables, and a scheduled process builds the vouchers automatically.
No spreadsheet consolidation. No manual data loads. No email-based approvals.
But here’s the detail that really stood out: the “copy from” feature. Kirsty noticed during testing that she kept entering the same supplier data over and over — and if it was tedious for her, it would be tedious for end users who pay the same clinicians every month.
“When I was testing and building this form, I was just getting really fed up of inputting the same data over and over again,” she said. “So that’s where that functionality came from.”
Now, users can copy supplier data from a previously submitted form. And because they might not remember the form ID off the top of their head, Kirsty embedded a query link directly within the form — click it, enter your department, and it returns your recent form IDs. No need to leave the page.
Approvals That Actually Scale
One of the most significant improvements is around approval routing. In the old process, the AP team was manually running reports to check whether an approver’s authority level covered the payment amounts in a given spreadsheet. That’s a compliance control that depended entirely on a person not making a mistake.
Now, a hidden field in the form calculates the highest payment value in the grid. The approval path adjusts dynamically — if a payment exceeds a threshold, additional approval steps are inserted automatically. Finance is brought into the approval chain upfront so they can review accounting entries before the data ever reaches PeopleSoft, rather than correcting them retrospectively at month-end.
“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. At the end of the day, we’re going to make errors. So relying on the system to actually route that correctly is a great benefit.”
The Functional Analyst as Form Builder
One of the themes that emerged during the webinar was how much of the GT eForms work Kirsty handles without needing technical support. She’s a functional analyst, not a developer — and that’s the point.
“I can pretty much do everything until it gets to a point where we need a data insert or views creating,” she said. Technical involvement is needed for things like combo edit code, field-level validations, and custom page development. But once those foundations are built, adding new forms is straightforward.
“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. I can just put a new option in the dropdown, complete that default value page, and implement a new form quite easily.”
That’s a meaningful shift for any PeopleSoft team thinking about capacity and sustainability.
51,000 Forms and Counting
Since going live in 2023, Bupa has raised over 51,000 forms across accounts payable, general ledger, user security, and e-procurement — with the UK Payment Form alone accounting for roughly 34,000 of those. They currently have 11 forms in production and one in development.
The benefits Kirsty highlighted weren’t abstract — they’re operational:
- Reduced rework through upfront data validation (combo edits on submit and approval, field-length enforcement for sort codes and account numbers).
- Eliminated spreadsheet reliance for processes that previously depended on emailed files and manual consolidation.
- Full audit visibility — online approvals with audit stamps replace email chains filed in folders.
- Enforced business processes — the petty cash form, for example, follows a strict review-then-withdraw-then-approve sequence that can be audited at any time.
- Reduced central team workload — AP no longer consolidates spreadsheets, troubleshoots formatting errors, or manually loads data.
And the user response? “We sort of work on a premise of no noise is good news,” Kirsty said. “When we went live with GT eForms, we didn’t have much noise. The transition was quite seamless.”
What’s Next for Bupa
The team isn’t slowing down. New form requests come from two directions: the business seeing what’s possible and asking for automation of their own processes, and the PeopleSoft team proactively identifying manual workflows that could benefit from the forms framework.
“Sometimes it’s us saying, we think this would be a good idea for you,” Kirsty explained. “We mock a form up, go out to the business, and ask their opinion.”
Christopher Livesey, Head of PeopleSoft Financials at Bupa, put it simply: “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.”
Lessons for Other PeopleSoft Teams
Bupa’s approach offers several takeaways for organisations looking to extend their PeopleSoft automation:
- Think in form families, not individual forms. Kirsty’s single-form-with-15-templates approach reduced maintenance overhead, simplified approval configuration, and kept all data in one place for reporting.
- Hide what users don’t need. Hidden segments and fields can carry critical backend data — supplier IDs, payment handling codes, accounting entries — without cluttering the user experience.
- Validate early, not late. Moving combination checks and field validations to the point of submission and approval prevents errors from reaching downstream processes.
- Design for the repeat user. Features like copy-from and embedded query links came from empathy with the end user’s daily experience — not from a requirements document.
- Future-proof the architecture. Building reusable technical foundations (custom pages, data pool configurations, approval frameworks) means new forms can be deployed with minimal — or zero — technical involvement.
Want to see the full webinar? Watch the recording here.
Interested in exploring what GT eForms can do for your PeopleSoft environment? Schedule a consultation with our team.
