The challenge
As a rapidly expanding company averaging 20% year-over-year growth, KBL Environmental has transitioned from a small business with basic bookkeeping practices into a medium-sized enterprise with a growing finance organization, yet for years continued to operate with a decentralized and manual AP process. Different departments had their own unique workflows, which created significant complexity and bottlenecks. The company relied on a full-time AP staff member to handle an average of 1000 invoices per month. Everything from invoice vetting, data entry, purchase order (PO), and GL coding was done manually.
The process was manageable until December 2023, when KBL acquired the project management division of a Canadian publicly-traded corporation. This acquisition immediately tripled their invoice volume and required hundreds of vendors to be onboarded across Western Canada. The manual system couldn’t keep up. The AP team was extended to 2.5 team members, but was already at capacity, and started having significant issues with delays in processing invoices, which created a bottleneck.
The team was overwhelmed with an influx of emails and calls from project managers and suppliers asking for updates on invoice status. It became clear that the company needed a technological solution to manage this new level of complexity and volume.
The solution
After defining their requirements, KBL Environmental chose to partner with Contexture for its AP automation solution. The implementation was very quick, with the system going live on August 18, 2024. KBL’s leadership praised Contexture’s team for their responsiveness, quick calls, and ability to interpret their needs and make suggestions. The team also provided ongoing customization and enhancements based on KBL’s feedback.
The Contexture platform centralized and standardized the AP process across KBL’s nine operating entities, making workflows much more streamlined and harmonized. The solution is also integrated directly with KBL’s existing ERP, Sage 300. Invoices now flow through a single, AI-powered AP Automation portal, where invoice data gets extracted, validated, matched and GL-coded automatically. The system also handles internal delegation of authority, ensuring invoices are routed to the correct approvers based on predefined limits.
KBL is also looking forward to a two-way PO matching capability and an integration with its front-end project management system, Forecast Plus, to further automate its workflows.
The outcome
Since implementing Contexture, KBL Environmental has seen an exponential return on its investment. The most significant improvement has been the timeliness of payments, with the average invoice processing time reduced from weeks to less than five days. This has dramatically improved relationships with both vendors and internal teams.
The AP team is now able to handle triple the invoice volume without increasing headcount, eliminating the need to hire new staff. The AP team’s daily routine has shifted from manual data entry to more strategic, value-added tasks such as vendor reconciliations and audit support. Previously, vendor reconciliations were a major pain point, but the team is now able to reconcile with over 150 major vendors monthly. KBL is serviced by over 400 vendors across the group each month.
KBL also gained unprecedented visibility and accountability. The AP team’s query queue is now current, with no requests older than 48 hours (subject to vendor exceptions), a vast improvement from the previous backlog of over 500 queries. The platform provides real-time metrics and data points, giving leadership confidence in the process and enabling them to track unprocessed invoices, see volume trends, and quickly diagnose where an invoice is in the workflow.
The ability to scale with their existing team has been a game-changer for KBL, and accounts payable automation has resulted in a more accurate and complete financial reporting process, allowing the company to focus more of its energy on servicing customers and delivering innovative sustainable environmental solutions.
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