Late last year I posted that we were in need of an Automatic Invoicing solution. After waiting on Corpay and Trimble for a while with no movement, I decided to build a lightweight AP automation tool in-house. Attached is a brief demo video walking through the application.
Here is a summary of what it does and how it works:
The platform is a web application that sits between our scanner and Spectrum. Our payables specialist scans batches of paper invoices on our Konica Minolta using yellow separator sheets between each invoice. The scanner routes the batch to a specific email address based on which project manager needs to code it. The system automatically splits the batch into individual invoices at the separator sheets, so there is no need to scan one at a time.
Once invoices land in a PM's online inbox, the system runs OCR against our vendor master list (approximately 500 vendors) to pre-populate the vendor field. The PM then codes each invoice to the appropriate job, phase, cost type, and G/L account. The coding interface supports line-item splitting with linked amount and percentage fields, so if a PM needs to split an invoice across multiple cost codes, the math stays in sync.
After coding, invoices route through a three-tier approval workflow before being exported as a formatted TXT file that imports directly into Spectrum's AP module. The whole point is to keep PMs out of Spectrum for this step. They get a clean, simple interface on desktop or mobile, and accounting gets a file that drops straight into the existing batch import process.
Some other details worth mentioning: the system pulls project phase and cost type data from our master file to keep coding options current, auto-saves coding work so nothing is lost if a PM navigates away, and sends a daily digest email each morning with any invoices waiting for action rather than bombarding users with individual notifications.
No sensitive financial data flows through the platform. There is no direct connection to Spectrum or any banking systems. It is a one-way export process, which actually gives us a better audit trail than the paper routing slips we were using before.
Happy to answer any questions or share more detail on the approach. For those of you dealing with the same gap between what Automatic Invoicing offers and what your PMs actually need, it is solvable without waiting on the vendors. For what it is worth, I am a C-level programmer at best. Anthropic's Claude has been an incredible tool in making this a reality, and I would encourage anyone with a similar itch to explore what is possible with AI-assisted development.
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Chris Graham CCIFP
Operations
Cone & Graham, Inc.
Tampa FL
(813) 623-2856
cgraham@conegraham.com------------------------------