Engagement snapshot
- Mandate
- Automate mismatch handling without hiding financial approvals or project accountability.
- Timeline
- 10 weeks to deploy across the highest-volume entities.
- Team shape
- Controller, AP manager, 2 automation engineers, and 4 project admins.
The problem
AP analysts spent most of their day chasing missing receipts and mismatched line items across job sites, vendors, and business units.
What we built
Implemented exception detection, routing, and approval workflows that pulled context from ERP, inbox, and job-cost systems.
Operating context
The group was not blocked by normal invoices. It was blocked by the exceptions that bounced around email and phone calls without clear ownership. AP workload rose because the organization had no reliable way to move mismatches to the right person fast.
Key constraints
- Approval responsibility depended on entity, project, spend level, and vendor class.
- Some mismatches required field context from job sites that lived outside the ERP.
- Finance needed full traceability for who resolved each exception and why.
What we built
Mismatch classification
Grouped exceptions by recurring cause so routing and follow-up logic could be standardized.
Context-aware routing
Pulled project, vendor, and receipt context to send the issue to the right approver or site contact.
Audit-ready resolution trail
Stored resolution steps, comments, and approvals as part of the workflow rather than in side-channel email.
Delivery path
Exception taxonomy build
Analyzed historical invoice issues to identify the repeatable mismatch patterns worth automating.
Entity pilot
Launched in a subset of business entities to validate routing logic and escalation timing.
Rollout and tuning
Expanded across entities while refining resolver roles and notification thresholds.
Why it mattered
The automation reduced AP friction because it did not try to automate approvals. It automated the routing, visibility, and evidence gathering needed to resolve exceptions faster and with less back-and-forth.
Implementation notes
- AP automation often wins more on exception flow than on the happy-path invoice.
- Construction finance workflows depend heavily on field-aware routing logic.
- Analysts adopted quickly once they saw cleaner queues instead of more system noise.