Accounts Payable Automation Case Study for Retailer

Client Profile

Our client is a leading, high-growth specialty retailer headquartered on the West Coast. The private equity-backed business operates four e-commerce sites aimed at outdoor enthusiasts, competitive cyclists, and powersports enthusiasts, as well as a growing retail footprint in the U.S.

Similar to many e-commerce retailers and marketplaces like Amazon, the client’s online retail business operates with a dropshipping model, sending online orders it receives to third-party vendors that ship products directly to consumers. The client also competes against larger retailers and e-commerce sites by maintaining an “endless aisle,” providing shoppers at its brick-and-mortar stores the opportunity to order products online that are out-of-stock or not normally sold in-store.

As a result, maintaining strong relationships with a large, fragmented set of vendors is key to the retail client’s success – and timely vendor payments are vital to preventing supply chain disruptions and providing seamless shopping experiences to customers.

The client had previously outsourced accounts payable functions to Auxis after surging demand for online shopping and outdoor products during the pandemic overwhelmed its internal AP department. With vendors continuously putting the client’s account on hold due to late payments, Auxis was hired to optimize accounts payable processes, establish a scalable AP team, and help stabilize AP operations from its Global Delivery Center in Costa Rica – achieving an incredibly fast, four-week turnaround.

Read our AP outsourcing case study to learn more about how Auxis helped support the e-commerce client’s hyper-growth.

But the retailer faced another challenge: as invoice volumes continued to increase, more AP staff were needed to ensure timely payments, which increased operating costs. With a robust intelligent automation practice that supports its outsourcing solutions, Auxis identified an opportunity for the retailer to increase productivity without adding more staff – investing part of the labor savings derived from outsourcing into automating its high-volume, manual invoice process.

AP automation stands as the top digitization priority for CFOs – with 85% of AP teams realizing efficiency gains and 63% reporting faster, more timely payments from automation, according to the 2023 State of AP report. 

Key challenges of the client’s manual AP invoice process included:

• Repetitive, time-consuming work. The retailer’s manual invoice process was tedious and time-draining, requiring staff to monitor a vendor email inbox, download attached vendor invoices from every email, verify details, and enter invoice data into the client’s NetSuite enterprise resource planning (ERP) system.
• Unnecessary steps triggered processing delays. The client’s process required busy AP supervisors to enter the vendor mailbox and manually assign invoices to staff, creating unnecessary dependencies and processing delays.
• Inconsistent invoice formats. A single vendor invoice might have dozens of pages while other vendors combined several invoices into a single PDF, complicating manual processing and increasing the likelihood of errors.
• High chance of errors and process exceptions. Manual AP processes are error-prone, increasing the risk of process exceptions that cause late payments.

Auxis identified UiPath’s Document Understanding tool, ranked the