How to Streamline Invoice Processing

How we saved 10+ hours weekly by giving finance a simple interface. Our finance team was processing invoices the same way for years: 1. Email attachments → 2. Manual download → 3. Print → 4. Physical signature → 5. Scan → 6. Manual data entry The entire cycle took 3-5 days. The request to "build a proper approval system" kept getting deprioritized—it felt like a multi-month project. We reframed the problem: We didn't need a complex system. We just needed to connect two things: the data from our accounting software's API and a simple list where the right people could click "Approve" or "Reject." What actually got built: • A single-page app that pulls unpaid invoices automatically • Logic that routes invoices over $5k to directors, others to managers • A comment field for rejections • A basic audit log showing who approved what and when What changed: ✅ Approvals now happen in under 24 hours ✅ The finance team stopped chasing paper trails ✅ Vendors get paid faster ✅ Every decision is logged automatically The takeaway: Sometimes "digital transformation" isn't about big platforms. It's about giving a team one less PDF to manage by building a simple, focused tool that sits on top of the data they already use. What's the most stubborn, repetitive task in your team's workflow? Often the highest-impact tools are the smallest ones that remove a single point of friction. https://uibakery.io/ #ProcessAutomation #FinanceTech #OperationalEfficiency #DigitalTransformation

"We just saved $24,000 a year by fixing one broken process."   That's what my construction client told me after we transformed their accounts payable system. As a fractional controller, these are the wins that get me excited.   Let me share what was happening behind the scenes. This growing construction company was drowning in paperwork - their team was spending 15-20 hours weekly manually entering invoices, chasing down approvals from project managers in the field, and reconciling payment records. Late payments were straining vendor relationships, and they had zero visibility into their cash flow.   Here's what we did: We implemented BILL as their AP automation solution. The transformation was remarkable. Within just two months: ✔️ Their AP processing time dropped to just 3 hours per week ✔️ Project managers could approve invoices right from their phones ✔️ Vendors started getting paid consistently on time ✔️ They saved $2,000 monthly in administrative costs ✔️ Most importantly, they gained real-time visibility into their cash flow   But the best part? 𝗧𝗵𝗲𝗶𝗿 𝗔𝗣 𝗰𝗹𝗲𝗿𝗸 𝘁𝗼𝗹𝗱 𝗺𝗲 𝘀𝗵𝗲 𝗳𝗶𝗻𝗮𝗹𝗹𝘆 𝗳𝗲𝗹𝘁 𝗶𝗻 𝗰𝗼𝗻𝘁𝗿𝗼𝗹 𝗼𝗳 𝗵𝗲𝗿 𝘄𝗼𝗿𝗸 𝗶𝗻𝘀𝘁𝗲𝗮𝗱 𝗼𝗳 𝗱𝗿𝗼𝘄𝗻𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗶𝗻 𝗽𝗮𝗽𝗲𝗿𝘀 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗲𝗺𝗮𝗶𝗹𝘀. She's now focusing on more strategic tasks like vendor relationship management and process improvement.   I've seen this pattern repeatedly in my work with various businesses. 𝗠𝗮𝗻𝘂𝗮𝗹 𝗔𝗣 𝗽𝗿𝗼𝗰𝗲𝘀𝘀𝗲𝘀 𝗮𝗿𝗲𝗻'𝘁 𝗷𝘂𝘀𝘁 𝗶𝗻𝗲𝗳𝗳𝗶𝗰𝗶𝗲𝗻𝘁 - 𝘁𝗵𝗲𝘆'𝗿𝗲 𝗰𝗼𝘀𝘁𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝘆𝗼𝘂 𝗺𝗼𝗻𝗲𝘆 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗽𝗼𝘁𝗲𝗻𝘁𝗶𝗮𝗹𝗹𝘆 𝗱𝗮𝗺𝗮𝗴𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝘆𝗼𝘂𝗿 𝘃𝗲𝗻𝗱𝗼𝗿 𝗿𝗲𝗹𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻𝘀𝗵𝗶𝗽𝘀.   _____________________________________________ I'm Melissa Armstrong, CPA* and founder of SteadyHand Accounting & Advisory. Want to get insider tips and tricks from a powerhouse accountant on how to streamline your accounting operations? 𝗝𝗼𝗶𝗻 𝗺𝘆 𝗩𝗜𝗣 𝗺𝗮𝗶𝗹𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗹𝗶𝘀𝘁 (𝗹𝗶𝗻𝗸 𝗶𝗻 𝗰𝗼𝗺𝗺𝗲𝗻𝘁𝘀).   *𝗡𝗼𝗽𝗲𝗅 𝗜 𝗱𝗼𝗻'𝘁 𝗱𝗼 𝘁𝗮𝘅𝗅

Too many business owners and finance teams spend time manually matching payments to invoices. This is a terrible use of time. They spend hours cross-referencing $2,500 deposits, trying to guess if that wire transfer came from Customer A or Customer B. It feels like productive work, but it’s actually just expensive data entry. When we built the invoicing product at Haven, the goal wasn't to give people a way to send PDFs. The world has enough of those. The goal was to eliminate the financial detective work that eats up a founder's focus. Our system handles the auto-matching of payments. When a customer pays, the invoice is marked as paid. Period. No manual clicks, no checking bank balances against invoice numbers, and no wondering why your ARR reporting feels off because you forgot to update a status on a Tuesday. Scaling a company is already hard enough. You shouldn't make it harder by doing work that a well-built piece of software can do for you. Learn more here: https://lnkd.in/eGjz_q83

Eric Foster, Director of Finance & Ops at Compa, wasted HOURS on submitting invoices to portals every week. Here’s how Invoice Butler fixed it👇 For context: Compa helps some of the world’s biggest companies figure out high-stakes pay decisions. Eric joined as Head of Finance during a period of rapid growth, but their AR setup only scaled to ~20 customers. > Manual invoices in QuickBooks > One master Google Sheet for deals > Another Google Sheet for collections > Manual follow-ups… if anyone remembered He tried to fix it by automating invoicing. Yet, collections and enterprise portals remained manual. The real issue: Compa’s enterprise customers paid invoices via different portals, not automated dunning. This meant: - Overdue AR stacking up - Dozens of Coupa and Ariba accounts across reps - Invoices stuck for weeks between creation and submission Eric was left with two options: do it himself or hire an analyst to do just this. Neither scaled..... That’s when he found Invoice Butler.. Within a week of collaborating: • $120K collected in an overdue invoice  • A small follow-up brought ~$130K in the bank • Overdue accounts dropped from 15-20 to barely 2-3 More importantly, Eric got his time back. Instead of chasing invoices, he could focus on working with founders on growth strategy. He could confidently deploy capital on sales hires, engineering investments, and vertical expansion. As Eric put it:  “Invoice Butler does the annoying part ....consistently, persistently, and better than I ever could. I haven't touched Coupa/Ariba in months.” PS: We’re on a mission to automate B2B cash collections forever. If enterprise invoice submissions to supplier portals are draining your time (and sanity), we might be able to help. Full case study link in the comments👇

Stop sending "Quick reminder on that invoice" emails forever. Here's how we tie in an automated system for some of our clients: - Connect Xero to Stripe natively or connect Quickbooks to Acodei - Set up recurring invoice templates - Enable auto-pay options for clients - Automate payment matching in your books Results from one agency client: - Reduced payment delays by 84% - Saved 12 hours per month on invoice admin - Improved cash flow prediction accuracy to 94% - Zero additional dollars spent hiring collection agenices Offering auto-pay doesn't just help you - it helps your clients too. I find that MOST clients happily chose auto-pay when given the option because: - No manual processing each month - Simpler expense tracking - Better budgeting on their end But here's what most miss: Don't just automate the invoices. Automate the ENTIRE system: - Payment reminders - Receipt generation - Bookkeeping entries - Revenue recognition - Tax documentation Your time is worth more than chasing payments.

If your month end close takes longer than 3 days, you're wasting company money. There's no excuse for 20+ day closes anymore. I've been there. Chasing receipts, coding transactions, reconciling accounts, fixing errors. By the time you're done, the data is already two weeks old. Leadership is making decisions based on outdated information. There's a better way to do this. → Why Close Takes So Long Day 1 through 5 is usually transaction processing. You're manually coding every transaction, uploading receipts, verifying vendors, matching invoices to payments. Day 6 through 10 is reconciliation and cleanup. Bank reconciliations, balance sheet recon, journal entries, fixing all the mistakes from the first week. Then you maybe get a day or two for actual analysis before you have to start the whole process again next month. → The 3 Day Close What if you could compress all of that into 3 days? Day 1 would be transaction processing, but automated. Auto classification, bulk processing, receipt upload, vendor verification happening in the background. Day 2 would be reconciliation, but most of it handled automatically. Bank reconciliations, balance sheet recon, journal entries, receipt matching done for you. Day 3 would be where you actually add value. Flux analysis, margin review, balance sheet check, creating dashboards, telling the story behind the numbers. → How BILL Makes This Possible BILL uses AI to automate the entire close process. Their touchless receipts feature auto codes and reconciles transactions with 92% accuracy. Smart invoicing extracts invoice data instantly from over 1.3 million documents it's been trained on. The W-9 Agent automatically requests and validates W-9s, cutting manual work by 80%. Their AI eliminates most manual entry errors, and they've saved customers over 650,000 hours annually. Plus you get live dashboards for instant decision making instead of waiting two weeks for data. They've also stopped 8 million fraud attempts, which is pretty impressive. Check it out at https://lnkd.in/eQtCpDaw → What This Means for You Cutting your close from 10 days to 3 days means you're not spending half the month on data entry. You're spending that time analyzing trends, having strategic conversations, working on higher value projects. The close happens in the background, you just review and approve. === What's your biggest pain point with month end close? Let me know in the comments below 👇

Manual invoice processing costs finance teams hundreds of hours every year? Here's how to fix it. Most finance teams are losing hours every week on AP tasks a system could handle. I spent years as a CFO signing off on payment runs. Half the time, the real bottleneck was upstream - invoice capture, approvals, matching. Not strategy. Data entry. Here is what accounts payable automation actually covers: 𝗜𝗻𝘃𝗼𝗶𝗰𝗲 𝗖𝗮𝗽𝘁𝘂𝗿𝗲 ✅ Automatic invoice capture and data extraction ✅ Email, PDF, portal - all ingested automatically 𝗪𝗼𝗿𝗸𝗳𝗹𝗼𝘄 𝗔𝘂𝘁𝗼𝗺𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 ✅ Approval workflows without chasing people on email ✅ Rules-based routing with a full audit trail 𝗘𝗿𝗿𝗼𝗿 𝗣𝗿𝗲𝘃𝗲𝗻𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 ✅ 2-way and 3-way purchase order matching ✅ Duplicate payment detection before it costs you 𝗩𝗶𝘀𝗶𝗯𝗶𝗹𝗶𝘁𝘆 ✅ Real-time view of what is owed and when ❌ No more spreadsheets tracking open invoices manually ❌ No more month-end surprises from unrecorded liabilities 💡 The business case is straightforward. Fewer errors. Faster close. Better cash flow timing. And your team stops doing work that adds zero analytical value. Want to see how AP automation works inside a real finance function? Check out how BILL can transform your process. P.S. Where are you losing the most time and money when it comes to managing AP?

Every finance team I talk to is trying to figure out how to scale finance ops without just adding more headcount. Here’s what we learned from a study of how America’s Auto Auction uses AI to speed up every part of procure-to-pay: It’s always chaos at the start. Invoices everywhere. Tons of manual downloading and uploading. Desperate attempts at tracking via Excel. As the business grows, it gets worse. What’s missing is visibility into what’s happening, automation to speed it up, and auditability to make sure it’s done right. That’s exactly what we offer. “We grew fast and honestly, I felt like I was drowning before we got Stampli. In the last two years, we’ve taken on more auctions without having to increase our headcount.” What worked? 1) Implementing a progress dashboard showing who’s handling an invoice, how long it’s been sitting, and when it’s due. Tracking productivity in real time. 2) Applying finance-specific AI like Stampli, which automatically fills 2500+ unique fields and integrates directly with the ERP. Shaving off a few seconds of typing at a time might seem small, but over thousands of times a day, it adds up to huge time savings so you can keep headcount in check. 3) Automating audit reports so Controllers can run reports without training and you always know your AI is accurate. This speeds up closes and gives leadership the confidence to turn the data into smarter decisions. This is how you get faster invoice processing and stronger vendor relationships. “As we’ve grown, Stampli has grown with us. The volume increased and we didn’t have to increase headcount to keep up,” Adriane from America's Group AP team says. “My only regret is that we didn’t do it sooner.” More here on how Stampli makes finance stress-free: https://lnkd.in/gxqY-zaj

Accounts Payable (AP) Process in a Company 1. Invoice Receipt Description: The company receives invoices from vendors for goods or services provided. Sources: Invoices may come via email, post, or an Accounts Payable automation system. Key Activities: Ensure the invoice is addressed to the company. Confirm that all necessary information is present (vendor details, invoice number, amount, etc.). 2. Invoice Verification Description: Ensure the invoice details match supporting documents to confirm its validity. Steps to Follow: Perform a 3-way match: Compare the invoice, purchase order (PO), and goods receipt. Check: Vendor name and details. Invoice amount and quantity. Tax amounts (GST, VAT, etc.). Payment terms. Tools: Use accounting or ERP software for automated matching. 3. Approval Workflow Description: Send invoices to the relevant departments for review and approval. Steps to Follow: Route invoices to authorized personnel for approval. Ensure all approvals are documented (digitally or physically). Objective: Prevent fraudulent payments and ensure compliance with company policies. 4. Recording the Invoice Description: Once approved, invoices are recorded in the company’s accounting or ERP system. Steps to Follow: Enter vendor details, invoice number, date, and amount. Code the invoice to the correct general ledger (GL) accounts (e.g., expenses, cost of goods sold). Mark the invoice as "pending payment." Goal: Accurately record liabilities to maintain proper financial statements. 5. Payment Scheduling Description: Plan and prioritize invoice payments. Steps to Follow: Review the invoice due dates and payment terms (e.g., Net 30, Net 45). Take advantage of early payment discounts, if available. Ensure sufficient funds are available in the company’s bank accounts. 6. Payment Processing Description: Issue payments to vendors. Steps to Follow: Process payments through checks, wire transfers, ACH (Automated Clearing House), or other methods. Communicate the payment details to the vendor (e.g., remittance advice). Goal: Make payments on time to maintain vendor relationships and avoid late fees. 7. Reconciliation Description: Compare company records with vendor statements to ensure accuracy. Steps to Follow: Reconcile vendor accounts by matching payments with invoices. Identify and resolve discrepancies, such as overpayments or outstanding invoices. Tools: Use bank reconciliation software or manual reconciliation. 8. Reporting and Record-Keeping Description: Maintain accurate and up-to-date records for compliance and auditing purposes. Steps to Follow: Generate reports (e.g., aging reports, vendor payment summaries). File invoices and payment records digitally or physically. Comply with tax regulations and audits by keeping records for a specified duration.

How we shrank 30-40 hours of weekly manual work into just 2-3 hours 🤯 (Automation Tip Tuesday 👇) This home services company was struggling with their invoice reconciliation process. They received numerous vendor invoices via email (PDF format) and needed to manually match them against jobs in ServiceTitan. Their team was stretched thin, discrepancies and overpaying were daily occurrences, and one day, they had enough. We worked on a three-step automated solution: Step 1: Finding the PDFs Zapier monitors the inbox for invoices. When it detects an invoice with a PDF attachment, it proceeds to Step 2. Step 2: Parsing the Data Nanonets uses AI to extract data from the PDF. Step 3: Data Comparison The extracted data is compared with jobs in ServiceTitan. Any discrepancies are added to a spreadsheet for internal review. 30-40 hours of weekly manual verification time is now just 2-3 hours. With instant discrepancy flagging, their system allows for better vendor management, improved billing accuracy, and more time for the team to pursue higher-value tasks. Which manual task that can be automated is currently taking up too much valuable time? If you’re thinking of one, it’s time we spoke. Book a free call (link in the comments 👇) and let’s see what we can do for your workflow. -- Hi, I’m Nathan Weill, a business process automation expert. ⚡️ These tips I share every Tuesday are drawn from real-world projects we've worked on with our clients at Flow Digital. We help businesses unlock the power of automation with customized solutions so they can run better, faster and smarter — and we can help you too! #automationtiptuesday  #automation #workflow