You sign off on vendor invoices yourself, and the AP inbox is eating your evenings.
You retype invoices into QuickBooks or Xero and chase approvals by email.
Hundreds of invoices a month, a close that keeps slipping and exceptions nobody owns.
Contractors, distributors, restaurant groups, clinics and property managers.
Numbers from the latest AP benchmark studies — the gap between an average team and the best ones is almost entirely automation.
Average cost to process one invoice. Best-in-class AP teams get it down to $2.78.
Ardent Partners, 2025 ↗Average invoice cycle time, against 3.1 days at the best teams — late fees and missed early-payment discounts.
Ardent Partners, 2025 ↗of AP teams name exceptions — PO mismatches, unknown vendors, bad scans — as their biggest problem.
Ardent Partners, 2025 ↗of invoices go through with no human touch on average. Everything else still waits for a person.
Ardent Partners, 2025 ↗of US organizations faced payments fraud in 2025; fake bank-detail emails are a main route.
AFP Payments Fraud and Control Survey ↗is what issuing a single paper check costs once printing, postage and reconciliation are counted.
Bottomline, citing Ardent Partners / IOFM ↗Put your monthly volume into the calculator and see hours and dollars.
Accounts payable automation replaces the manual path every vendor invoice takes — open the email, retype the numbers, hunt for the purchase order, chase an approval, post the bill, schedule the payment — with a workflow that does the routine steps on its own. In a typical AP process most of the time is not spent on decisions but on moving data between an inbox, a spreadsheet and the accounting system. That is exactly the part AP automation removes.
We build AP automation as a workflow around the tools you already use rather than a new platform to migrate to. Invoices arriving at your AP inbox are read with OCR and a language model, validated, checked for duplicates and matched to purchase orders. Clean invoices are routed for invoice approval in Slack or Teams and posted to QuickBooks Online, Xero or your ERP with the PDF attached. Exceptions — a price mismatch, an unknown vendor, a request to change bank details — stop and go to a person with the reason written out.
Invoice processing automation shortens the cycle from receipt to approval from days to hours, protects early-payment discounts and leaves an audit trail of who approved what. Your team stops retyping and starts handling only the invoices that genuinely need judgement. The payment run is still approved by a person, so end-to-end AP automation never means losing control of the money.
The run path of a typical accounts payable workflow. Each invoice travels it on its own; anything unclear stops and goes to a person.
Watches the AP inbox (ap@…); every PDF or image attachment starts its own run, including invoices forwarded from colleagues.
Stores the file under a stable name in Google Drive or SharePoint, so every bill in the books links back to its source document.
OCR plus a language model read vendor, invoice number, dates, line items, tax and total into a strict schema — on any vendor template.
Totals must add up, the vendor must exist, and the same number, amount and date must not already be in the books. Otherwise the run stops here.
Emails that ask to change a vendor’s bank account are flagged; the vendor is put on hold until someone verifies by phone on a known number.
Looks up the purchase order and goods receipt in QuickBooks, Xero or your ERP by vendor, PO number and amount.
Compares invoice, PO and receipt line by line using your price and quantity tolerances.
Clean matches go straight on. Anything off is routed to the right person with the reason already written out.
Sends a Slack or Teams card with the PDF and Approve / Reject buttons to the approver chosen by amount and cost centre.
Reminds after 24 hours, escalates after 48 and logs who approved what and when — your audit trail.
Posts the bill to QuickBooks Online or Xero with GL codes learned from the vendor’s history, attaches the PDF and sets the due date.
Groups approved bills by due date and early-payment discounts into one batch. A person approves the batch — money never moves on its own.
Monday summary in Slack: invoices processed, open exceptions, upcoming payments and hours saved.
Typical minutes per invoice in a small AP team. Your own numbers go into the calculator below.
Based on 12 min by hand and 36 sec with the flow per item, from the table above.
The flow reads, checks, matches and routes. People keep every decision that moves money.
Large or out-of-budget invoices always go to the budget owner.
The flow prepares it; a person approves it before anything is paid.
Verified by a phone call on a number you already have — never by email.
Price or quantity mismatches, partial deliveries and credit notes.
W-9 collection and company checks before the first bill is posted.
When the model is not sure, a bookkeeper confirms the account.
Flip a switch to hand a step to the flow or take it back.
Benchmarks from Ardent Partners’ 2025 AP study: the best teams turn an invoice around in about three days, with half of all invoices never touched by a person and exceptions under one in ten.
We map the process as it runs today, count the minutes and agree what the flow must never do on its own.
A working flow on your real data, in a sandbox. You see every run and every exception.
Edge cases, approvals and alerts, then the switch-over — with the old way kept as a fallback.
Monitoring, fixes when a vendor changes a format, and a monthly report of hours saved.
It works with what you already have. The flow writes bills through the QuickBooks Online and Xero APIs, and NetSuite, Sage Intacct and Business Central are supported too. Your chart of accounts and approval rules stay the same.
Fields are extracted by an OCR and language-model step into a strict schema, then checked by code: totals must add up and the vendor must exist. If anything is uncertain, the invoice goes to a person with the field highlighted instead of being posted.
No. It prepares the payment run by due date and early-payment discounts, and a person approves the batch. Money never moves without a human sign-off.
Every invoice is checked by vendor, number, amount and date against what is already in your books. Emails asking to change bank details are flagged, the vendor is put on hold and a call-back task is created to verify on a known number.
Put your own volume into the calculator above. Teams handling a few hundred invoices a month usually win back days of work every month; at very low volumes a simple off-the-shelf tool may be enough.
They are good when your process fits them. A custom AP workflow makes sense when you have your own approval rules, several entities, a specific ERP or documents an off-the-shelf tool reads poorly — and you would rather not add another per-user subscription.
On your own server or in your own cloud account. The extraction model can run locally, so invoices never leave your network, and every step is logged for audit.
Describe it in two sentences — we reply within a day with a workflow sketch.
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