Automating Accounts Payable in QuickBooks Online

Advanced Framing Construction | Greenville, TX

Team: ~70 field | 20+ office
Systems: QuickBooks → NetSuite | Fieldwire | Mitre

How We Saved a Construction Company a Full Day of AP Work Every Week

A large framing contractor with more than $100 million in annual revenue was processing hundreds of vendor invoices every week in QuickBooks Online.

Their AP employee had to manually enter each invoice into QBO, including the project information needed to properly track job costs. The process took days every week.

The company was also facing a staffing problem. Their AP employee needed to reduce his schedule while attending college, which meant the company was considering hiring another person just to keep up with the workload.

The Problem

QuickBooks Online was working for the accounting, but their existing process required too much manual data entry.

Hundreds of invoices had to be entered individually, and each invoice needed to be connected to the correct construction project.

At their volume, manual AP wasn't scalable.

What We Built

Instead of adding another employee, we redesigned the process.

Vendor invoices were loaded into SharePoint, where we created a process to:

Extract the key invoice information → identify the correct project using the ship-to address → prepare the accounting and project fields → upload hundreds of invoices into QuickBooks Online using Spreadsheet Sync.

The accounting team still reviewed and controlled the process.

They just didn't have to key every invoice by hand.

The Result

The new AP process:

• Saved approximately one full day of AP processing every week — about a 20% reduction in weekly AP labor

• Eliminated the immediate need to hire an additional AP employee

• Saved more than $30,000 annually in expected payroll costs

• Reduced repetitive manual data entry

• Maintained project-level accounting needed for construction job reporting

And the company didn't have to replace QuickBooks Online to solve the problem.

Sometimes the answer isn't another person or another piece of software. It's fixing the process you already have.