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AP invoices posting touchless at a fastener maker

Added 2026-10-14

Role

AP manager, controller

The problem

A fast-growing company cannot hire AP clerks fast enough. Birmingham Fastener tripled in size in nine years; even with 80% of invoices arriving by email, matching them to POs, fixing problems and tracking status stayed manual, communication between departments was disjointed and metrics were hard to track.

Step by step

Measure the baseline: invoices a month, share matched to POs, touchless rate, discounts captured, late payments.
Fix master data first: supplier records, PO prices and receipt discipline, or three-way matching fails.
Set tolerances for price and quantity and who approves exceptions.
Turn on automatic capture and matching for PO invoices from your top suppliers first.
Let the system post invoices that pass all checks; route the rest with the reason shown.
Use deadline alerts to prioritise invoices with early-payment discounts.
Review the touchless rate and exception reasons monthly and fix the causes upstream (wrong PO prices, missing receipts).

Tools

Esker Accounts Payable with Enlighten.Net ENet Docs, on Epicor P21: used at Birmingham Fastener
Other AP tools: Rossum, Medius, Basware, Stampli, Tipalti, ERP AP modules

Result

Birmingham Fastener (T-head bolt maker and fastener distributor, 748 employees, 20 locations in the US and Mexico, Epicor P21 ERP), Esker AP with Enlighten.Net: after one year, 74.3% of PO invoices post automatically; payment discounts captured rose from 85% to 98%; the AP team absorbs growing volume without new hires (Esker customer story, a vendor claim).

As reported by the source; most figures are vendor or self-reported and not independently verified.

Human review: cautions

Vendor-published figures.
Touchless posting relies on clean POs and receipts; without them, automation just moves errors faster.
Keep a separate check for supplier bank-detail changes (fraud risk).

Try it yourself

You are an AP analyst. I will paste a supplier invoice, the PO and the goods receipt.
1. Extract invoice header and lines.
2. Do a three-way match line by line (quantity received vs invoiced, price PO vs invoice) using tolerances [x% price, y units].
3. Suggest GL codes per line based on [our chart of accounts list].
4. Verdict: post / exception, with reasons, and the discount deadline if terms allow one.
Do not guess unreadable fields.

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Sources

https://cloud.esker.com/fm/others/034-esker-accounts-payable-customer-story-birmingham-fastener-en.pdf