An invoice comes in. Someone needs to approve it. Someone else needs to code it. The accounting team needs it in the system to get a complete picture of what the business owes.
Each step sounds simple. The trouble starts in the space between them.
An approval sits in an inbox. A project cost lands in the wrong category. More invoices arrive, but the team handling them stays the same size. Soon, processing payables means spending a surprising amount of time asking where things are and what happens next.
Those challenges surfaced in three conversations with ACE Micro, Blue Moon Industries, and LBMC on The Channel Buzz podcast, recorded at Community Summit. Across the discussions, the practical questions were consistent: How can customers reduce manual work, trust their ERP data, and help their teams keep up?
For businesses looking at accounts payable automation, those questions are a useful place to start.
One of the clearest examples came from ACE Micro: companies still stamping invoices and passing them around for initials. Once the invoice leaves the accounting team's hands, visibility goes with it.
The team knows a payment is coming due. What it may not know is whose desk the invoice is on, whether anyone has reviewed it, or what is holding it up. Finding out becomes another task on the list.
Email can leave a similar gap if the process still depends on someone remembering to forward a message, follow up, or report that an approval is complete.
Pick a recent invoice that took longer than expected to approve. Can your team answer these questions?
The goal is to make the status visible and the next step clear, so accounting does not have to reconstruct the story every time someone asks about a payment.
When a business grows, the accounting team doesn’t always grow with it. Blue Moon Industries sees this with customers acquiring other companies: there are more invoices to process, but often the same people doing the work.
That means more approvals to chase, more information to enter, and more questions to resolve before payments can go out. A process that worked well enough before the acquisition can quickly become difficult to keep up with.
Start by asking the AP team what takes up most of its day. Are people reviewing invoices and resolving issues, or spending hours forwarding emails, entering the same information into different systems, and following up with approvers?
Those everyday tasks are a useful starting point for automation. Automatically routing invoices and sending reminders can reduce follow-up work, giving the team more time to investigate an incorrect amount or resolve a charge that doesn’t match the purchase order.
When evaluating a solution, use examples from your own workload. Can it send invoices to the right approvers? What happens when someone is unavailable? How does it flag an invoice that needs a closer look?
The goal is to help the team handle more work without every additional invoice creating another round of emails and reminders.
The LBMC conversation brought the issue into construction, where an invoice also needs to connect to the right project, commitment, cost code, and cost type.
Getting a bill into the system is only part of the job. If it is coded incorrectly, the information used to understand project costs can be misleading. If it arrives late, the project team may be looking at an incomplete picture.
LBMC also connected timely cost entry with billing and cash-flow challenges. For workflows where billing depends on recorded costs, a delay in AP can affect what happens next.
That makes industry fit an important part of an automation review. Ask a provider to walk through a realistic invoice using your project and costing structure. Include a coding mistake, a missing reference, and an approval that needs to happen before posting.
Watch how the system handles each situation. Who checks the coding? Where does an exception go? At what point can someone see the cost against the project?
Those details will tell you more than watching a perfect invoice move through a demonstration.
While the conversation around ERP often focuses on AI and new features, accounting teams want to know what those changes will mean for their day. Will month-end become easier or more complicated? Who checks the work? Will their experience still be valued?
Blue Moon Industries raised this concern during the podcast: some customers are trying to understand the technology while also worrying about what it means for their jobs. Those questions deserve time and clear answers.
Involve the people handling invoices early. Ask them to bring examples of the problems they deal with regularly, then walk through how the proposed solution would handle them. Show what would happen automatically, what would still need their review, and how they could catch and correct a mistake.
Their input can reveal overlooked steps or approval rules that won’t work in practice. Giving them a say in the process also helps them feel more prepared to use it.
All three conversations also explored why these firms chose to partner with Yooz. Their answers offer useful criteria for evaluating an AP automation provider.
ACE Micro emphasized functionality and price alongside responsive implementation and post-implementation support. Blue Moon pointed to a customer-focused approach and the importance of recommending solutions it could stand behind as an advisor. LBMC emphasized the fit with construction workflows, including commitments, coding, and approvals.
These are the partners' perspectives, and they point to questions worth asking any prospective provider: Who helps configure the workflow? How closely does it fit the way your business operates? What support is available after launch?
Before your next AP automation demonstration, bring three invoices:
Use those examples to judge how much work the solution would take off your team’s hands.
You already know what those invoices cost your team in time and effort. They are a good test of whether a different process would make the next batch easier.
These insights came from three episodes of The Channel Buzz recorded at Community Summit. Listen to the full conversations with the links below:
Blue Moon Industries: Behind the Buzzwords, There’s Work to Do
ACE Micro: From ERP Decisions to Everyday Headaches