Automate incoming invoices with your own system instead of BILL and Expensify
We build the layer that pulls invoices from email and photos, extracts them, codes them to your accounts, matches them to orders and routes approvals. Your ledger and payment providers stay as they are; we write into them through their APIs.
- ≈$169k → $60–$80k a year at 1,500 invoices a month
- Pays back in 7–14 months
- Ledger and payments untouched
BILL
Expensify
Dext
Tipalti
Stampli
AvidXchange
Fully loaded processing cost when the share of invoices nobody has to touch rises from the 32.6% industry average toward 75–80%. Next to the hours you get back, the software subscription is a rounding error.
Why you are overpaying
Accounts payable, expense capture and spend operations.
You will feel this category most, because the cost here is people’s time rather than a line item. It is also where the boundary matters most. We replace the capture, coding, matching and approval layer, and we never replace the general ledger or the payment rails.
Most of the cost is labour
Ardent Partners’ 2025 AP metrics put the industry-average fully-loaded cost at $9.40 per invoice, best-in-class at $2.78, and manual or paper-based processes at $12.88–$19.83. On average 32.6% of invoices pass without a human touch, and best-in-class companies reach 49.2%. The average cycle is 9.2 days, against 3.1 for the best.
At the $9.40 average, a company processing 1,500 invoices a month spends about $169,000 a year on processing. With a stable supplier base, a well-built pipeline (extraction, coding, matching) moves the touchless share toward 80%. That is worth far more than the software line item ever cost.
- Capture from the inbox and from photos
- Extraction and coding to your chart of accounts
- Matching against purchase orders and receipts
- Approval routing, an exception queue and duplicate detection
- The general ledger (QuickBooks, Xero, NetSuite, Sage). We write into it through the API and never replace it
- Payment execution: ACH origination, positive pay, card issuance and the compliance around them
When there is nothing to replace
Ramp and Brex have free tiers, and they really are free: they are funded by card interchange instead of subscriptions. If that is what you use, there is no subscription to displace, and the case rests only on processing cost and hours saved. We will tell you that on the first call.
Build economics
Indicative ranges for a production system rather than a prototype: authentication, audit log, error handling, monitoring and a usable admin are included. Build assumes AI-assisted delivery by a senior team. Run cost covers inference, hosting, monitoring and maintenance, but not new features.
How the project goes
- 01
SaaS audit
Identify which tools have the highest cost-to-utility ratio.
- 02
The 80/20 parity
Instead of aiming for 100% feature parity, build the 20% of features your team uses 80% of the time.
- 03
Context-first architecture
Design the system around your data (vector databases + RAG) so the AI understands your jargon, clients, and history from day one, and organize it around workflows rather than apps.
- 04
An AI-native operating model
Plan governance, risk controls, human oversight, data readiness, and team structure as part of the strategy instead of leaving them for cleanup after launch.
- 05
Phased decommissioning
Run the custom tool in parallel with the SaaS for 30 days before cutting the subscription.
Cases
Here goes a project in this category: the task, what we built and the before/after figures.
Here goes a project in this category: the task, what we built and the before/after figures.
Questions about this replacement
No. Your ledger stays, and we write into it through the API. Payment execution (ACH, card issuance and the compliance around them) also stays with specialist providers.
Let’s size this for your company
Tell us which tool you pay for and roughly what volumes you handle. We’ll come back with an honest estimate and tell you if switching to another vendor makes more sense than building.
