"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 things that are really interesting: taking that vendor approval flow so that you can create vendors, automating the extraction of invoices you're getting from vendors into NetSuite, what the ROI looks like and when it makes sense to use an automation solution. We also talk about accruals and how to do month-end closing faster, and different ways to do approval automations 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, make sure I understand what all of NetSuite can do. I'm familiar with Charted and a little bit more about the product, but there are areas that I think I could still learn a lot more about and 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 understanding of what AP automation is so that people can 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 historical accounts payable process and the way things have worked in the back office for the past 30 or 40 years. The real innovation that existed prior to the past few years was just being able to copy and paste information out of PDFs. A lot of businesses, when they consider their AP process, it is a lot of humans sitting there taking invoices, copying and pasting information into NetSuite or 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 a lot of organizations, and up 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 adding automation and intelligence into those workflows. Now rather than humans performing repetitive mundane processes, we can automate the simple things—using AI to extract data off of invoices and map that directly into NetSuite, using integrations into the banking network so we can automatically pull funds out of an account and push those directly to a vendor's account. So eliminating the whole check process or the risk of 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 just 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 take a baseline of what the native NetSuite processes are out of the box without any add-on modules. You can create a vendor record, you can create a PO for that vendor, you can manually create a vendor bill for when you receive an invoice from that vendor. At the moment, these are all impacting the GL within NetSuite, and it's great for being able to have full transactions and the procure-to-pay process for these vendors.
But AP automation takes it to another layer. 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 to tell you what you should 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 on receiving that invoice from the vendors, but explain what that means a little bit 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—someone from the AP team is emailing the vendor, asking for their W9, maybe you have a form that they fill out with all of their tax and 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 the automation perspective: natively within NetSuite, you create a new vendor, you 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, 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, now you can dynamically capture all of the data that you absolutely need. Then we put an approval record on that saying: hey, this is what we've received from the vendor, these are the fields that have been updated and changed, do you approve 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 to NetSuite. So when that vendor clicks submit, it's going to that vendor record that has been created and attaching the attachment to the W9, inputting their company name, their address, and other additional 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're not needing 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 and approve, and everything in between Charted handles.
Lee (08:54)
That's exactly it. And maybe I'll share my screen here and I can give you just the most simplistic example of this. Here you see that I'm just going to walk you through the flow for updating bank account information for a vendor. This is one of the most common ones and also one of the most risky scenarios we see, where bank account information can easily be fraudulently submitted by a third party or fat fingered or different errors that could come into play 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 the vendor's going to 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're able to capture the vendor's bank account information. Based on what country they're in, we're able to update that so that we have all the required fields to actually process that vendor's payments.
Caleb (10:27)
And now that 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 or whoever your approver in the organization is to go in and approve that 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 that updated payment.
Lee (10:57)
Here you see we have 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 this other information, I just go in as the admin and I approve this record.
Caleb (11:32)
So all within NetSuite and that's where all the approval flows. That's amazing. So we've talked about the automation of 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—like our real killer app that most of our customers are really 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 off of 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 that came from that same vendor, we're going to look at any changes you made previously, any coding you did to that invoice previously, and we're automatically going to suggest that. At least 70% of the time, the invoice is going to be completely coded and you're just going to have to click save to submit that invoice for approval.
Caleb (12:45)
That makes sense. So at the point of creation, receiving an invoice—you typically would get this via email. Normally I'd have to just manually create the vendor bill in NetSuite, add all the lines, all the details from that. That might take 10 minutes per invoice, and then save it and move on to the next one, plus the distraction time that an employee has to be able to enter in 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, 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 look at to make sure we have confidence that invoice is actually going to be correctly coded. There's 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 that just to go through the happy path. So the AP organization never has to touch those. That's a pretty high volume—we've seen close to about 30% of all invoices going through our invoice AI solution being processed touchlessly just off of POs alone.
The other piece of the solution that we released was vendor-specific touchless invoicing. We know that a lot of customers receive invoices every month that 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 for those specific vendors to 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 maybe anything that was processed touchlessly is always going to go for an approval before it actually hits the GL. But that's saving a large 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 be able to have that. I can see in high volume scenarios that takes 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 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 time that you should 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 that full-time employee focused on accounts payable, once you have a controller in the organization, those are kind of the flags we look for. Small businesses who are starting with 15, 20, 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 draw some quick assumptions to decide on how to make some ROI. Let's say that it takes on average 10 minutes to do a vendor bill—is that fair?
Lee (17:59)
Ten minutes is pretty good.
Caleb (18:10)
That means you got 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 840 invoices a month roughly that 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 probably starts to definitely make sense around that level. Let's take an AP person—this is an admin type of role, they're probably making $50,000 a year roughly. 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—$70,000 a year cost to business for an AP person to do roughly 800 invoices a month.
I said divide by two—the value $35,000 a year recurring 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. So you said 400 invoices a month, so that's 4,800 invoices per year. And then usually we assume they're combining some of those invoices into multiple invoices in one payment. So let's say they're doing like 3,000 payments per year and like a 50/50 split between check 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—it's their Metrics That Matter report in 2024—they measure the fully burdened cost (what you just calculated): labor, overhead, software licenses, paper, envelopes, those types of things. The fully burdened cost per invoice that's processed 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 they 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 got to go through that process to print it, to mail it. 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 significant cost for that office, that desk, that printer, and so on.
Let's just take the conservative estimate: $4 per check and then recalculate all of this. 4,800 invoices, 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 subscription, number of scans, and then your efficiency gain. 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 size 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, your total labor burden goes down quite a bit.
Lee (24:19)
Exactly. As particularly as they're preparing for growth, this is where we'll see the earlier stage companies come in at that 4,800 invoices per month, because a few years from now when they are at the 10,000 mark, this is going to 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 training costs—you just wanna automate it, make it easier now.
I'm guessing people don't think of it as a main pain point until, because if it's just break even, it's just 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? Because the moment you have to start training, the ROI increases past that 200 mark because you're taking leadership time and training time—that's additional cost beyond the $50K of that 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 that math that we just saw, if you're doing more than 200 vendor bills a month, then at that stage Charted is a great solution to just be switching to.
Lee (26:27)
That's a solid recommendation. And I really like all the alternative factors you pulled in there as well. One of the ones that we hear a lot of 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, your burden to 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 the vendor creation and we talked about extracting the vendor bill. Are those the main two components or are there other components that you can think of within the AP automation side of things?
Lee (27:43)
There are quite a few. One of the other ones we tackle is accrual automation. This is a big piece for a lot of organizations, especially the more sophisticated organizations, in month-end close. And it's the AP team who's usually looking to book the accruals at the end of the month.
We're looking at data on open purchase orders. We're looking at historical expenses per vendor so that we can forecast what your month-end accruals should be. So let's say you normally have $200,000 in legal expenses every month, but you've only been billed for $50K this month. We see historically the past three months what your rate has been and we can predict what this month should be.
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 someone from AP is going to 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, they'll finish doing their calculations, and then they'll upload this 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 afterwards. So once the actuals come in, that journal reversal will be automatically entered.
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 any outside system where your auditor doesn't have transparency into what has happened or why you calculated the accrual. It's all happening in your native NetSuite environment. We're able to capture any notes, any adjustments, and then obviously the actual journal entry and the reversal of that journal all within NetSuite. So it's easily audited and consolidated 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. Is there any other automations that jump out at you that are 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 fairly straightforward, small organization, easy approvals. We often see the larger organizations with more complex approvals, more approvers, different thresholds coming 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 this 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 that can do it and get to it faster than Susan because she just was busy or was 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 that has higher velocity and higher 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 with a check, well, now 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 they can create value very 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 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 level that's much more automated within NetSuite. And that's what I've loved about it. Even in some of the screenshots you shared, you could tell that it's fully embedded within NetSuite so that it just feels like you're working in NetSuite all day long and you're able to go through all your processes without navigating into a lot of systems. I love that. It's a really clean interface. It actually makes NetSuite more usable.
I know the building blocks that you're using that I often use on customizations inside of 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 those other automations that we haven't discussed and as the product continues to evolve for 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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