15 people, one vendor, and a maze of approvals.
A controller's tale of taming chaos in a high-tech manufacturing company
Tim Lawson, Controller at Aperia Technologies, was juggling a mess of custom manufacturing approvals, POs that needed both engineering specs and executive sign-off, and a warehouse full of incoming inventory that never quite matched the invoices in the system. But the story has a happy ending —proving that even skeptical engineers will fall in love with Stampli. Here’s how it went down.
INTERNAL/EXTERNAL DISCUSSIONS
Centralizing internal communications
“Having all our invoice-related communication centralized in Stampli has been super helpful for month-end reviews. Our CFO can now look directly at the communication threads – previously, he didn’t have access to the AP email inbox where all these approval discussions were happening. Now when there’s a question about an invoice, whether it’s about the department or the account, we can open it with one click from NetSuite and see the entire conversation history.”
“Plus, approvers can now hand off invoices to the correct person themselves. When you’re dealing with manufacturing and engineering, you might have 15 different people ordering from the same vendor. If we send it to the wrong engineer for approval, they can just pass it directly to the right person instead of bouncing it back to AP.”
EFFICIENCY
Eliminating manual matching work
“The biggest efficiency gain has been around our inventory invoices. Before Stampli, we had to do this tedious double-entry process – entering everything into Excel spreadsheets just to track pending invoices, then manually matching them line by line with inventory receipts in NetSuite.
“When you’re getting five or six invoices a day from some vendors, those inventory receipts really get lost in the shuffle. It was taking about three-quarters of our AP time just to process about a third of our invoices. Now with Stampli automatically matching up the inventory receipts line by line, we just need to verify they’re correct. The time spent is actually proportional now – about a third of our time for a third of our invoices. Plus we can track pending invoices right in Stampli instead of maintaining separate spreadsheets.”
PERSONA-CENTRIC DESIGN
Making life easier for non-finance users
“One of our engineering managers told me an interesting story. When we first announced the new AP system, he rolled his eyes thinking ‘great, another system to log into’ and wondered if this would really be easier than just responding to emails. But he said he was sold almost immediately – within the first invoice or two, he could see how much better this was than dealing with PDFs in emails.”
“Our inventory purchasing team has also really taken to it. Once we showed them how to look up payment statuses themselves, they stopped having to message AP for updates. Some users were initially worried about missing notifications, but the automatic reminders for pending approvals mean we don’t have to chase people down anymore.”
ERP INTEGRATION
Streamlining the NetSuite connection
“The NetSuite integration was surprisingly quick to implement, and the team that helped us set it up was great. One of the most valuable features has been how easily we can connect invoice copies. Before, we either had to upload PDFs one by one into NetSuite, or we’d have to drag 20 PDFs into a file folder and then manually connect them to each invoice.”
“Now we just click a link and it takes us straight to the invoice. It’s saved us a ton of time just in document management alone. Having that direct connection between Stampli and NetSuite means everything is properly linked and accessible right when we need it.”
Beyond AP: How Stampli adapts to solve more than just Invoice Processing
Working with custom manufacturing approvals
Adaptability
“One of our unique challenges was dealing with custom manufacturing products like stamped plastics. These require multiple layers of approvals – our COO needs to approve the dollar amount, but we also need engineers to verify that specifications have been met. We needed a system that could handle both types of approvals simultaneously while ensuring we don’t release payment before both conditions are met.”
“Stampli also helped us with a really specific case around inbound shipment transactions from China, where we have to take on invoice liability before taking ownership of inventory. Other vendors told us they couldn’t handle this type of transaction, but Stampli worked with us to match these inbound shipment transactions to the invoices and POs, letting us get everything in the system early and accurately.”
Managing pending inventory receipts
“One of our frustrating processes before was dealing with invoices that arrived before the products. We’d just be sitting on these invoices waiting for a receipt in the system to match them up to. Now with Stampli, we can upload the invoice and have it sit in pending status, and Stampli tells us when the matching item receipt has arrived – it just pops to the top of the queue saying ‘Hey, this invoice is ready to be entered now.'”
“It’s surprisingly simple compared to our old process where we had to enter everything in spreadsheets for tracking, which meant double entry. At month-end, we used to spend time checking throughout the day or coordinating with the warehouse to watch for specific deliveries just so we could enter the invoices. Having Stampli manage this automatically has been a huge improvement.”
Smart rollout strategy
“We started by releasing Stampli to a select smaller group initially. We deliberately picked a mix – some tech-savvy users and our warehouse manager who’s more boots-on-the-ground and less tech-focused. Getting their experiences and feedback before rolling it out to everyone else really helped with the broader implementation.”
“Plus, the implementation itself was surprisingly quick. That was actually one of the factors that helped us decide Stampli was the right partner for us – how quickly we could get up and running and get the system working.”