AP cover while three finance seats sit open
Give us a folder of supplier invoices and a PO export. In two to three weeks we hand back a line-by-line match report showing which invoices are clean and which need a person.
Written for the President at Kentucky Trailer. Nobody at Kentucky Trailer asked us for this.
Our read of Kentucky Trailer
Kentucky Trailer builds specialty trailers, custom transport trailers, and truck bodies, engineer-to-order, from a Louisville campus at 7201 Logistics Drive plus other local sites. Every custom build is its own bill of material, so purchased material arrives against many POs from steel, axle, electrical, and specialty component suppliers, and each invoice line has to land on the right job. The Warren Manufacturing asset acquisition and the Michigan division relocation add supplier names and invoice paths at the same moment the Controller, Assistant Controller, and AP Specialist roles are all posted.
- ✓ Controller, Assistant Controller, and Accounts Payable Specialist are all posted at once. Invoices keep arriving while those seats are open, and this is work that does not need a new hire to start.
- ✓ Engineer-to-order means a unique bill of material per trailer, so invoice lines have to be matched back to specific jobs and POs rather than to a standing part number. That is the case our line-by-line matcher was built for.
- ✓ The Warren Manufacturing asset acquisition adds suppliers and invoice formats, and the Michigan division move changes who receives what. Both push more paperwork through AP without more AP people.
- ✓ Consolidated statements from high-volume distributors are the failure mode we have already fixed. On a prior pilot, unpacking consolidated vendors recovered 22 invoices worth $28.7k that a one-PDF-one-invoice pipeline had silently dropped.
Consolidated statement and job-number audit
Two to three weeks from the day the files land.. No fee for the pilot.
Split every PDF into the invoices it actually contains, including consolidated statements that bundle several invoices or several jobs into one file
Extract header and line detail from each invoice, then match line by line against your PO and receipt export
Sort the results into clean, price variance, quantity variance, duplicate, missing credit, and cannot-match-to-a-job
Show the reasoning behind every match and every flag in the UI so your AP person can check our work in seconds
Sit down with you and Laurel to walk the exceptions and separate real problems from bad data
What we need from you
- ✓ One month of supplier invoice PDFs or forwarded invoice emails, ideally including your highest-volume distributors (fasteners, electrical, steel service center)
- ✓ A flat export from your ERP of the matching POs and receipts for that period, CSV or Excel, read-only
- ✓ A short list of the divisions and job-number formats we should expect to see
What you get back
- ✓ A match report over your own month of invoices: every invoice, its status, and the PO and job it landed on
- ✓ An exception list ranked by dollars, with the reasoning shown for each item
- ✓ A count of how many invoices were hiding inside multi-invoice PDFs in your sample
- ✓ A one-page note on what would be needed to run this continuously against your ERP, with the ERP named
How you can tell it failed
We lose if we cannot correctly break the consolidated statements in your sample into their component invoices, or if the exceptions we rank at the top all turn out to be our own errors rather than yours.
We are already hiring an AP Specialist and a Controller. Let them get settled and we will look at tools next year.
Fair. This is not a tool decision yet and it does not compete with those hires. It is a read of one month of your own invoices, done on files you already have, with no integration and no write access to your ERP. If the new Controller starts and we hand them a ranked exception list and a picture of where invoices go missing across divisions, their first month is easier. If we find nothing, you have a clean audit of a month of AP and it cost you a file transfer.
What we do not know about Kentucky Trailer
We built this from public sources. These are the things we would have to ask you, and they are the ones that decide whether any of it is worth your time.
- ERP system. Not named publicly. This decides how the PO and receipt export comes out and what a production version would look like.
- Ownership. The dossier lists ownership as null. If AP now runs through a corporate shared-services center, the Louisville team may not be the buyer.
- Monthly invoice volume, and whether AP is handled centrally in Louisville or separately by KTSV, parts and service, and the Michigan division.
- Whether an AP automation tool is already in place, and if so what it does with multi-invoice PDFs.
- Which distributors send consolidated statements, and whether job numbers appear on those statements at all.
Tell us where this is wrong.
We are in Louisville and we would rather be corrected in person. If the read is off, the twenty minutes still cost you less than reading this page twice.