Case study

Accounts payable automation case study: $150K a year, automotive, QuickBooks

An automotive company was losing finance time to invoice intake, coding, and approvals. Exceptions stalled in email. We put extraction, duplicate checks, routing, and payout controls around QuickBooks. Labor savings were $150K a year.

The situation

  • Industry: automotive
  • Ledger: QuickBooks

Invoice intake, coding, and approval routing were eating recurring finance time. Exceptions had too many places to stall.

What we built

An LLM-backed workflow around QuickBooks, not a replacement for it.

  • Document extraction from the invoices the team already received
  • Duplicate detection before payment
  • Approval routing from business rules, instead of an inbox
  • The handoff into QuickBooks
  • Payout anomalies surfaced before money left

What changed

  • $150K annual labor savings
  • Faster processing
  • Less manual handling, with a control path someone can follow

Processing got faster, and the control path is something finance can follow.

What I would repeat

Keep the ledger. Automate intake, the match, and the exception owner. Read the best practices if you want the operating version of this, or the QuickBooks page if that is your system. Sage Intacct and NetSuite get the same design, and I will say so on those pages without pretending this engagement ran on them.

Common questions

What was the accounts payable automation result?

An automotive company on QuickBooks saved $150K a year in AP labor. The workflow parsed invoices, detected duplicates, routed approvals, and flagged payout anomalies before payment.

Which ERP did the accounts payable project use?

QuickBooks. The company is in automotive and is not named here.

What did the workflow actually do?

Document extraction, duplicate detection, approval routing, business rules, and the handoff into the ERP, plus a check for payout anomalies before money left.

Accounts payable pages

Bring the invoice path and the ledger you close in.

The assessment maps intake, approvals, exceptions, and whether to wire the ERP you have or buy something else.