Absorb the new plant's invoice volume without new headcount
We run a batch of your recent supplier invoices against your PO and receipt exports and return a line-by-line match with exceptions called out. Read-only files, no ERP connection, nothing to install.
Written for the Controller at Lantech. Nobody at Lantech asked us for this.
Our read of Lantech
Lantech builds stretch wrappers, case erectors, case sealers, tray handling equipment and parcel pack systems out of Louisville, and the dossier marks them as discrete production rather than engineer-to-order. That means repeating machine configurations, repeat suppliers, and a lot of purchased material: motors, drives, conveyors, bearings, steel, electrical. The paper that follows is a high volume of supplier invoices, many of them arriving from industrial distributors as statements with several invoices inside one PDF.
- ✓ There is an open Accounts Payable Coordinator role posted right now. Either the seat is empty or the workload grew. Both are reasons to see what the matching work looks like when a machine does the first pass.
- ✓ Capacity is going up: a new case equipment manufacturing facility in North America, and 15,000 sq ft added in Jeffersontown in June 2023 with 12 new openings. More build volume means more purchased parts and more invoices.
- ✓ Discrete production of standard machine lines plus heavy material buying means the same suppliers and the same part numbers appear again and again. That repetition is what line-level matching is good at.
- ✓ Our pilot at a small industrial firm found 22 invoices worth $28.7k that a naive one-PDF-one-invoice pipeline had silently dropped. Those were consolidated vendor statements, which is the same document type industrial distributors send.
Consolidated statement audit
Two to three weeks from the day the files land.. No fee for the pilot.
Split every PDF into real invoices first, so a statement with nine invoices in it becomes nine invoices and not one
Extract header and line detail from each invoice, including freight, tax and credit memo lines
Match each line to its PO line and receipt line, and show the reasoning behind every match in the UI
Flag duplicates, price variances, quantity variances and credits that were issued but never applied
Sit with your AP person and walk the exception list top to bottom, marking each one right, wrong, or arguable
What we need from you
- ✓ Supplier invoice PDFs from one recent closed month or quarter, exactly as they arrived, including the distributor statements with multiple invoices in one file
- ✓ A flat export of the matching POs (PO number, line, part, quantity, unit price)
- ✓ A flat export of receipts or goods receipts for the same window
- ✓ Fifteen minutes with whoever does the matching today, to hear how they work
What you get back
- ✓ A spreadsheet with one row per invoice line: matched, variance, or unmatched, with the reason stated
- ✓ An exception list of duplicates, price and quantity variances, and missing credits, ranked by dollar value
- ✓ A statement-splitting report showing how many invoices were hiding inside multi-invoice PDFs
- ✓ A one-page note on what a production version would need from your ERP, written after we know which ERP it is
How you can tell it failed
We lose if your AP person reviews the exception list and agrees with fewer than half of the items, or if a single invoice inside a consolidated statement never shows up in our output.
We already have a system for this, and we are hiring a coordinator anyway.
Fair. Then use the pilot as an audit of the system you have. Send us one closed month of invoice PDFs and the matching PO and receipt exports. If we find nothing your current tool missed, you have a clean result to point at and we go away. The part we would look at hardest is the distributor statements with several invoices in one PDF, because that is where our last pilot found 22 invoices worth $28.7k that had been dropped without anyone noticing.
What we do not know about Lantech
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.
- Which ERP or MRP they run. A job posting for an Inventory Coordinator lists ERP as a required skill, but the system is not named anywhere public.
- Whether an AP automation tool is already in place. At this size that is a real possibility and it changes the conversation.
- Annual supplier invoice volume, and how much of it arrives as multi-invoice distributor statements.
- Whether AP runs entirely in Louisville. There are Dutch-language titles on the contact list, so there may be a European entity with its own AP process.
- Headcount is listed as 625 from LinkedIn but the employee range field says 201-500. Worth confirming which reflects the Louisville operation.
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.