Leading North American distributor unlocks millions in early payment discounts with AP automation
$4.8m
a year in projected early payment discounts
4
months go-live time in 31 subsidiaries
1
day invoice turnaround time
About the Customer
Our customer is a North American B2B distributor. The organization has grown rapidly through acquisitions and now supports 120,000+ customers with a portfolio of 100,000+ SKUs.
Paperless ≠ Automation
The AP process involved several non-integrated solutions and multiple manual touchpoints, resulting in work duplication and a 7-10-day invoice processing time. Manual processes resulted in processing errors, and dirty data was entering their ERP systems.
Most critically, the company could not capture early payment discounts or prevent duplicate payments.
“Before Rossum, we had three different groups, and each group was touching the same invoice, doing the same work every single time. It was taking seven to ten days to process an invoice, and on a busy Monday, we could be slammed with 700 invoices from the weekend alone.”
AP Manager
Business objective: maximize automation & discounts
The company set out to streamline its Accounts Payable operations, aiming to support its rapid expansion and acquisition-driven growth with scalable automation.
“AP is always first to integrate acquisitions – we needed a solution that could handle any ERP system from day one.”
AP Manager
Their objectives included:
- Establish end-to-end AP automation: processing of PO and non-PO invoices, dropship invoices, credits memos, and bills of lading, as well as validations against business rules.
- Capture early payment discounts.
- Implement automated tiered approval workflows.
- Ensure on-time payments.
“The previous tool was supposed to be automation, but all it did was make us paperless. We needed start-to-finish automation, not just less paper. What really pushed us was the loss of early payment discounts—we were hearing about it from the highest levels, and we knew something had to change.”
AP Manager
The solution: rapid two-stream implementation
To deal with the complexity of this distributed business, the implementation was broken down into two main streams:
- The Subsidiaries implementation with their own ERP systems
- The HQ implementation with the core ERP as the target system
Subsidiaries implementation
For the subsidiaries, Rossum was first deployed to handle invoice processing for all acquired companies still operating on their original ERPs. This approach allowed rapid integration of new acquisitions, regardless of their existing technology stack, and provided immediate automation benefits.
“With Rossum, we’ve been able to create business rules and thresholds That’s eliminated so many manual steps and created much more straight-through processing.”
Director of Accounts Payable
HQ implementation
At HQ, with the core ERP system, the implementation focused on delivering advanced automation and standardization, covering:
- Document ingestion & pre-processing: Rossum removes spam, duplicates, splits documents, classifies them and routes to appropriate workspaces. For example, invoices and credit notes are processed by separate logic.
- Data extraction & manipulation: This stage includes GL coding, tax coding, vendor & PO matching, detecting early payment discounts, and specific business logic.
- Collaboration & communication: The company uses Rossum’s email autoreply functionality to reject invoices as well as approval workflows.
Some of the specific business rules for the AP process include:
- 3% price discrepancy tolerance against the PO to maximize straight-through processing
- Automated selection of the most advantageous payment terms to maximize early payment discounts
All of the automated processing logic lets the AP team process invoices in just 1 day.
“Now, if we have a late invoice that needs to be paid, we can push it through today and have it ready for payment that afternoon. That’s one of my top three favorite features—the turnaround is so quick and efficient.”
AP Manager
Results
With 31 subsidiaries going live in 4 month and the HQ going live in 6 months, the company has seen results within several weeks:
- 60% reduction in missed early payment discounts: estimated savings of $4.8 million annually
- 96%+ average data extraction accuracy
- 19 seconds average review time for invoices that need validation
The future
The AP team is working on increasing the share of touchless invoices through GL coding powered by Rossum AI agents, as well as implementing new use cases such as processing remittances and order acknowledgements.
"Now, if we have a late invoice that needs to be paid, we can push it through today and have it ready for payment that afternoon. That’s one of my top three favorite features—the turnaround is so quick and efficient."
AP Manager
