"AP Automation That Actually Works" — Anchor Group Podcast with Charted
Caleb from Anchor Group sits down with Lee Jacobs, Head of Product at Charted, to break down what AP automation actually means for NetSuite users—and when it makes sense to invest in it.
Most businesses still run accounts payable the old-fashioned way: copying invoice data into NetSuite by hand, emailing vendors for W9s and bank info, and manually processing checks. It works, but it doesn't scale—and it's a drain on time and accuracy.
Charted tackles AP automation across four key areas:
Caleb and Lee run through the ROI math. At around 200 invoices per month, automation starts to break even. At 400+ invoices, you're saving real money—potentially $18,000+ annually on a modest volume. Factor in turnover, training, and the cost of your CFO manually coding invoices, and the case gets stronger.
AP automation isn't just about saving time—it's about reducing risk, improving cash flow, and freeing your team to work on what matters. If you're running a full-time AP function and processing hundreds of invoices monthly, tools like Charted can pay for themselves quickly.
Caleb (00:00)
Today, I bring on Lee to talk about Charted and their AP automation solution for NetSuite. We talk about a few really interesting things: taking that vendor approval flow so you can create vendors, automating the extraction of invoices you receive from vendors into NetSuite, what the ROI looks like, and when it makes sense to use an automation solution. We also talk about accruals, how to close the month-end faster, and different ways to automate approvals for purchase requisitions and purchase orders. Stay tuned because you will love this if you are in an AP department.
Lee, I wanted to talk a little bit more about AP automation and make sure I understand what all NetSuite can do. I'm familiar with Charted and a little more about the product, but there are areas where I think I could still learn a lot more, given all the functionality that has been developed over the years. It's one of my go-to products to refer people to for AP automation. Can you start by giving me a rough overview of what AP automation is, so people know what that topic covers within the NetSuite ecosystem?
Lee (01:18)
Sure. When we're thinking about AP automation, we're looking at the legacy accounts payable process and how things have worked in the back office for the past 30 or 40 years. The real innovation prior to the past few years was simply being able to copy and paste information from PDFs. A lot of businesses, when they consider their AP process, see it as a lot of humans sitting there taking invoices and copying and pasting information into NetSuite, QuickBooks, or whatever ERP they're using. Then some manual processes for approvals, generating ACH NACHA files to upload to their bank, printing checks, and stuffing them in envelopes. That's the baseline for many organizations, and until a few years ago, it was really just the industry standard, with very little automation.
The revolution that's really taking place over the past few years is the addition of automation and intelligence to those workflows. Now, rather than humans performing repetitive, mundane processes, we can automate the simple things—using AI to extract data from invoices and map it directly into NetSuite, and using integrations with the banking network to automatically pull funds from an account and push them directly to a vendor's account. So, eliminating the entire check process or the risk associated with the NACHA file upload.
We look at each step of that process along the way from the time you start a relationship with vendors to the time you're settling payments with them. We think: how can we use the technology available to us to make that process more seamless, so that humans can operate more strategically and manage by exception rather than having to perform each individual task?
Caleb (03:08)
That makes a lot of sense. Let's establish a baseline for the native NetSuite processes out of the box, without any add-on modules. You can create a vendor record, create a PO for that vendor, and manually create a vendor bill when you receive an invoice from that vendor. At the moment, these are all impacting the GL in NetSuite, and it's great to have full transactions and the procure-to-pay process for these vendors.
But AP automation takes it to another level. At the moment, natively out of the box, you're creating the vendor record manually, maybe creating the PO manually or directly off of some type of MRP requirements if you're in the manufacturing space, or maybe a drop ship scenario where you're automatically creating the PO off of a sales order. You've got some lightweight automations that tell you what to purchase. But then you're sending that PO, you're receiving goods into your warehouse as item receipts, and then at that point you're also getting the invoice from that vendor.
Each of these steps, especially from the invoice from the vendor, you're manually having to create the vendor bill—keying in everything manually inside of NetSuite so that you can reconcile and say this is the invoice I received from the vendor, which matches what I actually received, which matches what was on the PO in the first place. That's really the native process. And as many people can tell, those are manually keyed in. Now, if you've got just 20 invoices from vendors a month, it's probably pretty manageable. But there are different layers on top of that, where let's say you've got a thousand invoices a month—that would not be sustainable to have a human entering those vendor bills in and then tying them out and matching them against what you actually received to verify that the vendor's invoice is accurate.
So that's the native process. How does AP automation take this to another level? I know you alluded to it when you received that invoice from the vendors, but could you explain what that means a little more when you're using AI to extract that information?
Lee (05:39)
That is a really common question we get: What's different between Charted's solution and just NetSuite out of the box? It can be a little difficult or confusing to explain because our solution is so deeply embedded within NetSuite. Sometimes people don't even realize what is and is not our product.
Taking just a few examples of what you walked through the process: think of the vendor onboarding flow. Typically, the way it would work if you're using just NetSuite out of the box is that someone from the AP team emails the vendor, asking for their W-9. Maybe you have a form they fill out with all of their tax, address, and bank account information. That's all being collected manually via email, then usually pasted into NetSuite. As you're creating and updating that vendor record, what we do from an automation perspective: natively within NetSuite, you create a new vendor and give them a name. And then we have a form that can be sent out—that form can be fully customized to collect their addresses, their W9, all their different forms, and their bank account information. Then all that data can be securely captured and pushed directly back into NetSuite.
So rather than having somebody managing the back-and-forth via email and the copy-and-paste in NetSuite, and taking on the risk that they're going to fat-finger something or miss something, you can now dynamically capture all the data you absolutely need. Then we put an approval record on it, saying: "Hey, this is what we've received from the vendor. These are the fields that have been updated. Do you approve of these changes?" So automating what was previously a very manual, back-and-forth, error-prone process that can now be captured directly in NetSuite. You take the human element out of that.
Caleb (07:34)
Let me restate that for a moment. Normally, I would have to click save and create the vendor, but what you're saying is you enter the vendor name and maybe the vendor email, you click save, the very first time you're creating it, it sends an email out to that person with a link within that email to fill out a form. When they're filling out that form, that form data is integrated into NetSuite. So when that vendor clicks submit, it's going to the vendor record that has been created, attaching the attachment to the W9, and inputting their company name, address, and other information. I'm assuming it's a customized form—whatever you need to actually capture, depending on your industry.
So then, after they have submitted, all you have to do is say approve, I've received everything. You've got the admin on the procurement team initiating the creation and then approving it. They don't need to do anything in between, which can be a lot of emails back and forth. So that's the first part of AP automation—the setup of the vendor record. Create, approve, and everything in between: Charted handles.
Lee (08:54)
That's exactly it. And maybe I'll share my screen here and give you the simplest example of this. Here, I'm just going to walk you through the flow for updating a vendor's bank account information. This is one of the most common and one of the riskiest scenarios we see, where bank account information can be fraudulently submitted by a third party, fat-fingered, or affected by other errors that can arise as you're collecting information.
So we send out this form rather than accepting a bank account via email. The vendor's going to have to use multi-factor authentication to actually submit this form. The vendor receives this payment method update and will add their information.
Caleb (09:58)
So now we've submitted it. You've gone through and submitted the updated payment information.
Lee (10:04)
Correct. We can capture the vendor's bank account information. Based on the country they're in, we can update it so we have all the required fields to process that vendor's payments.
Caleb (10:27)
And now that it has been updated, that information actually is in NetSuite at that very moment. Is that right?
Lee (10:34)
Correct. As soon as it's updated, it's pulled back into NetSuite. And then there is an approval record for the person who submitted it, or whoever your approver in the organization is, to go in and approve the bank account information for payment.
Caleb (10:48)
That makes sense. And then it's in a dashboard for any approval for that accounts payable person to review the updated payment.
Lee (10:57)
Here, you can see our payment methods to approve dashboard. I've got five different payment methods here in my account. I'm just going to open up one of them—this one was requesting a check, but you see, I've got their mailing address here and all the information from the vendor. As I go through, you can see the email that was sent to versus what was requested. And if I'm willing to accept this change in the email, for instance, or any of the other information, I just go in as the admin and approve this record.
Caleb (11:32)
So, all within NetSuite, and that's where all the approvals flow. That's amazing. So we've talked about automating the vendor. That's one of the pieces. And then we've got some other automations that will likely occur. Tell me a little bit about some of the most common automations beyond that, or pick one other one that we'll walk through.
Lee (11:52)
The biggest one—our real killer app that most of our customers are dying to use—is our invoice AI. That is taking invoices that you receive from your vendors and capturing those directly in NetSuite and creating vendor bills based on the data that can just be extracted using OCR, and then intelligently mapping that data either based on information we've extracted from a purchase order that already matches in your system, or we're also looking at your historical invoices.
So if you've had an invoice from that same vendor, we'll look at any changes you made or any coding you did to that invoice, and we'll automatically suggest them. At least 70% of the time, the invoice will be fully coded, and you'll just have to click save to submit it for approval.
Caleb (12:45)
That makes sense. So at the point of creation, when you receive an invoice, you typically get it via email. Normally, I'd have to manually create the vendor bill in NetSuite, add all the lines and details. That might take 10 minutes per invoice, then save it and move on to the next one, plus the distraction time it takes for an employee to enter that data.
So what you're saying is you receive an invoice via email, and then all that information—whether it's from the body of the email or an attachment like a PDF attachment—gets extracted and mapped so that the vendor bill can get created in a draft format so that it can then be approved, and that it actually extracted it correctly. And that way, you're just doing some final check. And maybe just for ones that get flagged as having a certain degree of certainty, whether you've extracted all of the information or not, it can flag ones where it's like "I'm not sure, I'm taking a stab at it," and those ones you probably definitely want to review for final approval.
Does it auto-approve if it's over a certain degree of certainty? How does that work?
Lee (13:47)
That's a cool question because that's something we actually recently released—our touchless invoice processing solution. With that, we can take an invoice from sitting in your inbox to submitting it for approval without any human ever touching it.
Now, obviously, there are a lot of criteria we want to consider to ensure we have confidence that the invoice will be correctly coded. There are a couple of different ways we go about this. One is: if it's a PO-backed invoice and it matches the PO exactly within your tolerances, we can submit it to go through the happy path. So the AP organization never has to touch those. That's a pretty high volume—we've seen about 30% of all invoices processed touchlessly through our invoice AI solution, just from POs alone.
The other piece of the solution that we released was vendor-specific touchless invoicing. We know that many customers receive monthly invoices they never touch. Think of utility bills, for instance, where they're pretty simple. Our invoice AI learns it very quickly and easily, and they have a high degree of confidence. Those can also be set up so that those specific vendors can go through the happy path. So the AP team never has to touch those as well. And then they just hit your approval workflows.
So if it's above a certain dollar value, or if it was processed touchlessly, it will always require approval before it actually hits the GL. But that saves a significant amount of time for some of our customers. We've seen some of our customers over 25% adoption of touchless invoicing since we just released it in October—about two months, less than two months ago.
Caleb (15:43)
That's amazing. That's really neat to have. I can see in high-volume scenarios that take it to a whole new level of savings. It makes a lot of sense.
Now, I have a question that I'm not really sure what the answer is, because I don't know at what point do I should say that you should definitely get more of an AI where it's extracting the vendor bills. How many invoices a month—if I'm entering in a certain number of vendor bills into NetSuite manually today, at what point does it make it worthwhile to really go more automated? There's gotta be a certain threshold number that makes a lot of sense, and some where it's barely a pain point at that point. It's probably break-even at 200 invoices a month, meaning that probably worthwhile to implement if you plan to have any type of growth beyond that.
Lee (16:31)
It really depends on the business. Typically, I would say once you have a full-time person doing this AP job, that is definitely the time to begin automating. Some smaller businesses or businesses that are preparing for scale—think of pre-revenue biotech, private equity backed or growth equity backed software companies who are expecting quite a bit of growth—they will typically adopt automation a little bit earlier, as they'll also typically adopt NetSuite a little bit earlier, because they're preparing for that growth and they may not have the revenue but they have the spend.
But once you have a full-time employee focused on accounts payable and a controller in the organization, those are kind of the flags we look for. Small businesses that are starting with 15, 20, or 30 invoices per month—probably not worth the investment to actually automate the process because you can typically just have one person inputting, approving, and paying all your bills anyway. But as soon as that organization scales into multiple people, that's usually when we see the investment in the software start to pay off.
Caleb (17:42)
Let me do some quick napkin math on my phone here. I'm just gonna make some quick assumptions to decide how to generate some ROI. Let's say it takes, on average, 10 minutes to process a vendor bill—is that fair?
Lee (17:59)
Ten minutes is pretty good.
Caleb (18:10)
That means you get six an hour, times we'll call it seven hours a day, because you probably have team meetings or miscellaneous meetings, times that by 20 working days. That's roughly 840 invoices a month you're processing as a full-time employee. Let's actually just divide that by two for a moment. So divide by two, we're at like 420, but we'll say 400 just to keep it clean.
So at 400 invoices, it definitely starts to make sense. Let's take an AP person—this is an admin-type role; they're probably making roughly $50,000 a year. So let's take $50,000, but we have to calculate the cost of business, which is normally gonna be about 1.4x that. So that would be after taxes and things like that—a $70,000-a-year cost to the business for an AP person to process roughly 800 invoices a month.
I said divide by two—the $ 35,000-a-year recurring value is the value of doing roughly 400 invoices a month. So that's pretty interesting. When people think about how much they're actually paying in labor to process 400 invoices a month manually as someone making $50K a year, that cost of business is roughly $35K. Interesting.
Lee (19:52)
Well, I could have stopped you, actually—I have an ROI calculator I'm trying to pull up for you.
Caleb (19:58)
I just did the quick napkin math.
Lee (20:00)
You're pretty close. Hang on, I'll share the screen here too. You said 400 invoices a month, so that's 4,800 per year. And then we usually assume they're combining some of those invoices into multiple invoices for one payment. So let's say they're doing about 3,000 payments per year and a 50/50 split between checks and ACH, which is pretty typical.
So what we look at in the ROI calculator here is first the cost of doing things manually. According to a report from Ardent Partners—their 2024 Metrics That Matter report—they measure the fully burdened cost (what you just calculated): labor, overhead, software licenses, paper, envelopes, and those types of things. The fully burdened cost per processed invoice for an average organization is $9.87.
Caleb (20:58)
Hold on, let's do some quick math. I said $70K divided by... that was 840 a month. So one second. I'm calculating $70,000 divided by 10,000, and that's $7. I calculated seven.
Lee (21:26)
Nice. You're pretty close. If we're within a factor of 50%, that is a win. So let's take $9.87 for the sake of this math. ACH is fairly cheap to process because it can be done in pretty large bulk batches. Checks are very expensive. We look at this report from the AFP in 2022—they said anywhere between $4 and $20 per check. And that's taking into account how much manual labor someone has to do, like sitting there stuffing checks in envelopes.
Caleb (21:58)
It's a surprisingly high amount because, again, if you have checks to pay, you have to go through that process to print and mail them. That's labor. People are touching that. It's real labor. And real labor is way more expensive than people often realize.
Lee (22:22)
Truly. Especially if you consider that now you have to have somebody in an office, sitting next to a printer, just sitting there stuffing envelopes versus something that could be completely outsourced to a print center. So there's a high cost for that office, that desk, that printer, and so on.
Let's just take the conservative estimate of $4 per check and then recalculate all of this. 4,800 invoices and 3,000 payments, for a total annual cost of $54,000. So this is a pretty modest size organization.
We look at what our subscription would cost. For our largest package, we're looking at the subscription, the number of scans, and your efficiency gains. We expect there's still some manual labor left, so we take a 70% efficiency gain.
Caleb (23:09)
You got approvals, right? You still have to approve and review the outliers.
Lee (23:14)
Exactly. There's always going to be exceptions in the queue to spend time on, but now they're only spending time on exceptions versus the mundane and repetitive. You take the net there: $35,000. So, for a modest-sized organization—less than 5,000 invoices per year—they're saving $18,000.
Caleb (23:31)
Wait, so you just calculated the total annual cost at 400 a month, and your cost was $35K? Hey, that is pretty spot on. I was looking at a few hundred, I think.
Lee (23:51)
Yeah, your math was very solid. Looking at the bottom line, this is a pretty modest size organization. This is really where you'd start to see AP automation. But particularly if you're expecting to grow—if this organization thinks they're going to scale to 10,000 invoices and 7,000 payments—then this becomes a full-time employee.
Caleb (24:17)
Your savings go up, and your total labor burden goes down quite a bit.
Lee (24:19)
Exactly. As they're preparing for growth, this is where we'll see the earlier-stage companies come in at 4,800 invoices per month, because a few years from now, when they are at the 10,000 mark, this will prevent them from having to hire a second AP employee.
Caleb (24:45)
So what I'm seeing is that right at 200 invoices a month, it's probably break-even. It's worthwhile if you think you're gonna continue to grow, or if you don't wanna deal with the turnover costs of someone doing this and the training costs—you just wanna automate it and make it easier now.
I'm guessing people don't think of it as a main pain point until it's just break-even, because if it's just break-even, it's barely a pain point at that point. It's probably break-even at 200 invoices a month, meaning that probably worthwhile to implement if you plan to have any type of growth beyond that. Because it does two things: making the change when it flips, the ROI is just right there, and it maybe doesn't seem to make any money or really move the needle. It can still make sense to switch over at that point if you plan to grow anytime in the near future.
Or how reliable is that employee as a long-term employee? Are you doing any legacy planning? The moment you start training, ROI increases beyond the 200 mark because you're taking leadership time and training time—that's additional cost beyond the $50K salary for that AP person. Or if you're paying that person more than $50K a year, then all of those would be factors. The 200 a month is where there begins to be ROI. So I would say, based on the math we just saw, if you're doing more than 200 vendor bills a month, then at that stage, Charted is a great solution to switch to.
Lee (26:27)
That's a solid recommendation. And I really like all the alternative factors you pulled in there as well. One we hear a lot about is turnover within accounts payable. I mean, you can think of any mundane job where there's a lot of repetitive work—people aren't going to stick around very long for that.
Caleb (26:39)
It's high. It's quite high, actually.
Lee (26:48)
The more you can make the work a little more interesting and automate the mundane, the less often you're going to have to replace that AP person in your organization as well, which is extremely costly and burdensome. And then your CFO is the one coding invoices until you're able to hire somebody new.
Caleb (27:06)
Not only are you paying what your math showed—you got to train someone new. But when that person leaves, you're right, it's usually your more expensive employee who's making $80 or $90K or more a year. And so that doubles your costs and your burden on the business. And they're not doing more value-added things on top of that.
So that makes a lot of sense to me. What other types of automation—I know we talked about vendor creation and extracting the vendor bill. Are those the two main components, or are there other components you can think of on the AP automation side?
Lee (27:43)
There are quite a few. Another one we tackle is accrual automation. This is a big piece for many organizations, especially more sophisticated ones, during the month-end close. And it's the AP team that usually looks to book accruals at the end of the month.
We're looking at data on open purchase orders. We're looking at historical expenses by vendor to forecast your month-end accruals. So let's say you normally have $200,000 in legal expenses every month, but you've only been billed for $50K this month. Over the past three months, we have seen your rate and can predict what it should be this month.
So rather than the AP team having to go to each individual stakeholder across the organization and ask "did you have any hours from legal this month that you haven't received the bill for" or reaching out to those vendors themselves asking what the unbilled amounts are, we can use our solution to automate that process and speed up the month-end close.
Caleb (28:58)
So what do you mean by automate what process there?
Lee (29:03)
Automating the entry of the month-end accruals. Typically, the way it's going to work is that someone from AP will have a spreadsheet. They'll export all of their vendors that they usually work with, and they know they often have accrued expenses. And then they're either going to manually look at their POs or reach out to a department head to ask specifically "have you worked with legal this month, should we have been billed for hours that we haven't been billed for?"
Then they're going to enter that information—whatever they estimate the expense should be—in the Excel spreadsheet, finish their calculations, and upload it back into NetSuite.
So rather than doing that, we take the data out of NetSuite, create the table in NetSuite and then allow them to make any adjustments they want in the worksheet before automatically creating the journal entry for them.
Caleb (29:59)
I got it. So they're doing this because they don't yet have the invoices, but they still want to close out the month. And then do they go back and update that later based on actuals?
Lee (30:10)
They'll make a journal reversal afterward. So once the actuals come in, the journal reversal will be entered automatically.
Caleb (30:15)
Is that part being automated when you receive the actual vendor bill?
Lee (30:22)
Yes. And that's the beautiful thing—it's all happening natively within NetSuite too. So it's not an external system where your auditor doesn't have visibility into what happened or why you calculated the accrual. It's all happening in your native NetSuite environment. We're able to capture any notes and adjustments, as well as the actual journal entry and its reversal, all within NetSuite. So it's easy to audit and consolidate in one place.
Caleb (30:52)
That's a huge value add because it's not only the trying to figure out what these expenses should be that they're trying to compare, but also once you do get the actuals, going back to create those journal entries and tie them all out after the fact so that you can actually close your month and move on rather than waiting for all these invoices from all your vendors to come in. It makes a lot of sense. Are there any other automations that jump out at you as useful that we should talk about?
Lee (31:21)
We can talk about this all day if you want. The last one I'll mention is our approval automation. NetSuite has native approvals out of the box. They work fairly well, especially if you have a fairly straightforward, small organization, and easy approvals. We often see larger organizations with more complex approvals, more approvers, and different thresholds come to use our solution because they're looking for easily configurable matrices, out-of-office approvals (so you have backup approvers), and so on. NetSuite's native approvals work really well for vanilla out-of-the-box use cases.
Caleb (32:03)
More static. Like, here's your purchase requisition. Who does it go to if it's this amount? Who does it go to if this is the other amount? And how many layers of approvals is it? That's about it.
Lee (32:13)
Yeah, exactly. So once you want to add complexity to that matrix, that's where our solution comes into play. So it can be more easily designed to fit your business process rather than your business process being designed to fit NetSuite. I'd say that's the general theme across the board—how we take things the last mile inside of NetSuite.
Caleb (32:29)
So an example would be: you've got a purchase requisition, it goes to Susan, but Susan has PTO or got too busy, and it's been a day. Who's the backup person at that same approval level who can do it and get to it faster than Susan, because she was just busy or on PTO, but you need to keep things moving along? That makes sense to me—how it can be really useful to keep things moving in an organization with higher velocity and volume of POs and purchase requisitions.
Lee (33:15)
Especially when you're working with strategic vendors where you may have short payment terms. If you have discounts from Net 10, you've got to process these approvals very quickly in order to capture that discount on this bill. So if you're waiting five days for Susan to get back into the office and you're paying by check, well, it's already too late. You're not going to get that discount.
Caleb (33:40)
You're not going to get that 2% off a $500K invoice or whatever that is.
Lee (33:44)
Exactly. These types of rules can actually make money for your organization, or at least create value directly.
Caleb (33:54)
Well, thanks for going through all of these AP automations. I know you have more, but this was really cool to go through some of the key ones. We talked about the vendor creation approval flow, the vendor bill extraction to get it into NetSuite, accruals so you can do a month-end close, and then finally the approval process for POs and purchase requisitions.
It was really cool to talk about all of those. Charted really takes the procure-to-pay process to a much more automated level within NetSuite. And that's what I've loved about it. Even in some of the screenshots you shared, you could tell it's fully embedded within NetSuite, so it just feels like you're working in NetSuite all day long, and you're able to go through all your processes without navigating to a lot of systems. I love that. It's a really clean interface. It actually makes NetSuite more usable.
I know the building blocks you're using, which I often use for customizations in NetSuite. And that's part of the beauty of NetSuite as a whole—you can use these building blocks to build custom applications and products to have them live within NetSuite and interact with that NetSuite data. It's a great way to do architecture. And I'm a big fan of what you all have created. So thanks for coming on the podcast.
And I would love to have you on again to talk about some of the other automations we haven't discussed, and, as the product continues to evolve, about even more features.
Lee (35:21)
Well definitely. And thank you, Caleb. I enjoyed it. It was a great discussion. So thank you for having me.
Caleb (35:25)
Absolutely.
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