A fast-growing, acquisitive enterprise processed more than 145,000 invoices a year entirely by hand, at a cost to serve of about $570,000. Ashling designed and built an intelligent invoice processing solution that pushes most invoices straight through to SAP with no manual touch. It is projected to cut annual cost to serve by $270,000 and more than double the central accounts payable (AP) team's capacity. And because it extends to each new business unit the moment that unit joins SAP, the automation gets more valuable with every acquisition.
Every year, more than 145,000 invoices arrived by email. Every one was opened, read, typed into SAP, and matched line by line against purchase orders and receipts by hand. The process was slow and error prone.
It was also fragmented. A central AP shared services team handled invoices for the core business, while each acquired business unit ran its own AP process at its own cost. Cost to serve across the group ran about $570,000 a year, and it climbed with every acquisition. Growth, which should have been an advantage, kept adding manual work and expense.
The company needed one standard invoice process. One that could absorb new entities instead of multiplying the cost of running them.
Ashling designed and built an intelligent invoice processing solution on UiPath, engineered around one principle: let automation carry the volume, and keep people on the decisions that need judgment. Invoices come in, the solution reads and understands each one, checks it against the matching purchase order in SAP, and posts it directly to the system with the source document attached for full traceability. Most invoices complete that path with no human touch.
The work that needs a person still goes to a person. Anything the solution is unsure about, along with the exceptions that need business context, routes to an AP team member for review before it is finalized. A daily report gives business unit leaders a live view of what posted, what is in progress, and what needs attention, so the team keeps full oversight and a clear audit trail from mailbox to SAP record.
A single, centralized invoice process is projected to save $270,000 a year, replacing the fragmented, manual effort that once spread across the core business and every acquired entity. Most of that saving comes from volume the team no longer touches: an expected 60 to 75% of invoices flow straight through to SAP with no human intervention, a share projected to climb toward 90% within the first year.
That shift changes what the AP team spends its time on. Freed from keying and matching every invoice by hand, the central team more than doubles its processing capacity and can take on manual invoice work from across the group at a lower cost per invoice than each entity was paying alone. None of it comes at the expense of control. Every exception still passes through a person before anything is finalized, so the company keeps full oversight and a clear audit trail from mailbox to SAP record.
The real payoff is what happens next. Automating the core process frees the central AP team to absorb invoice work from acquired entities right away, at a lower cost per invoice than each entity was paying on its own. And once an entity moves onto SAP, the same automation extends to it instantly. One automation investment becomes an enterprise-wide standard, and every acquisition makes it more valuable rather than more expensive.
This is advise, build, execute in practice: a working solution that pays back on day one and keeps paying back as the business grows.
Ready to standardize your own invoice process? See how Ashling advises, builds, and runs accounts payable automation programs that scale.