Bottlenecks to breakthroughs: How modern finance teams automate and scale

Finance leaders today are expected to do it all—optimize cash flow, speed up close, improve visibility and still make time for strategy. But if you’re stuck chasing invoices or fixing reconciliation errors, you’re not leading the way you could be.

That’s where built-for-NetSuite automation makes the difference. Watch this practical session on how growing finance teams are cutting manual work and scaling their impact with end-to-end AP and reconciliation automation. We share real-world examples and show how modern finance teams are working smarter, closing faster and focusing more time on what really matters.

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Transcript

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Andrea Boyle: All right, so what we're going to do today is we're just going to jump in and get started, being mindful of everybody's time here, bear with me. All right. So. Andrea Boyle, senior Product Marketing Manager here at Zone & Co. Just a little bit about myself. I'm in South Florida. I have 20 years of experience in technology and software. I'm well over 14 years into marketing now and eight years into product marketing.

I'd like to introduce my co-host and the presenter for the day. This is Tereza. Tereza, could you share a little bit about yourself?

Tereza Yöndemli: Hi. Nice to meet you everyone. So I head up the solution consultancy team. I'm based in the Netherlands, sunny Netherlands these days. And so my team is responsible for presales. So we demonstrate all our solutions back to our customers. So everything that zone has to offer today is really about AP automation. So I will be talking about ZoneCapture, ZoneApprovals, and ZoneReconcile.

I welcome any questions, so please interact with us. I will be happy to answer your questions later.

Andrea Boyle: Wonderful, Tereza, thank you so much.

Today, here's what we're going to be covering. We're going to do just a quick introduction about Zone, in case you're new to Zone and you don't know who we are. We're going to identify some areas of where fragmented systems lead to bottlenecks in your AP process. Then Tereza's going to do a walkthrough on Zone's AP automation suite embedded directly in NetSuite to eliminate those roadblocks. And then we're going to try to do some Q&A.

So let's jump in and learn a little bit about Zone. So if you're new to Zone, welcome. We're glad you're here today. We're more than just a software company. We build native NetSuite apps that solve the most painful finance and accounting problems. Over 4,000 companies globally trust our solutions from everything from billing, payroll to AP. That includes the approvals and the reconciliations.

Our products work seamlessly within NetSuite, which means you get automation without having to manage another disconnected tool. Here, let's take a look at our suite of products. We're focusing today on Capture, Approvals and Reconcile, which all work together to automate everything from that invoice capture, approval workflow, and then how you reconcile your book.

Let's start with something we've all felt. Even if you've already invested in automation, the reality is automation alone is in solving the challenge finance teams are facing at the month end. We've seen automation tools implemented across AP, reporting, reconciliation, approvals, but if those tools live in disconnected systems, the result is more complexity, not less.

So let's take a look at what the data is telling us. 58% of CFOs say fragmented systems are delaying board reporting and limiting the insights they can share. That's a huge red flag at the executive level.

69% of finance professionals still re-key data manually across systems, even in automated environments. We're duplicating work. And 43% of automation investments fall short because of siloed implementations, meaning technology's there, but it's not connected enough to drive real value. These gaps create lots of hidden inefficiencies. Finance teams lose up to 30% of their time each month just to navigate between those disconnected systems. Only 17% of siloed teams can generate board ready reports with heavy manual consolidation.

And from a cost perspective, teams are overpaying 40 to 60% when they layer third party finance tools on top of their ERP instead of using native solutions. This is the core issue. Even the most advanced automation will underdeliver when your systems don't speak the same language, so your invoice capture tool doesn't talk to your approval process or your reconciliation requires data outside of NetSuite, you're still doing work twice and you're stuck at the month end.

Fragmentation has become the new bottleneck, and that's why exactly. We're going to unpack what we're going to unpack today. How native, connected automation inside NetSuite finally breaks that cycle.

Let's talk about the breakthrough. We've seen that fragmented systems slow everything down from invoice processing to reconciliation to reporting, the answer is in keep layering on more tools. It's to bring automation into NetSuite, right where your team already is working. That's what modern finance teams are doing today. They're turning to natively embedded automation that connects the dots across three key workflows, capture, approvals, and reconciliation.

These are the areas where manual work typically piles up and where disconnected tools create delays, errors and confusion. But when these workflows are built together inside NetSuite, everything changes. In just a minute, Tereza is going to walk you through how this works in action. She's going to show you how finance teams capture vendor invoices automatically, whether it's PDFs or structured e-invoicing, routing approvals through workflows. So you're not changing responses down, you're not trying to figure out where your approvals are, and then reconciling those transactions quickly and accurately without jumping between so many different systems.

All that isn't just about getting a cleaner interface, it's about connecting your process. One that reduces manual work, improves accuracy, and gives you visibility. You need to move faster.

So with that being said, we're going to go ahead and jump into the demonstration for today. But first, Tereza, I'm going to turn it over to you.

Tereza Yöndemli: Thank you so much. So such as in every of our demonstration, I like to show you a little, basically, process flow so we are all on the same page.

So first of all if you look at this process flow, this is a very simple AP process flow, not starting with a purchase order when we onboard a supplier. So we have a vendor records inside NetSuite. That's why the black box around it and that supplier issues the invoice for us.

Now with ZoneCapture, which is the first application that I will be showing you from the NetSuite system today, its going to take care of that invoice. And depending how the issue has happened, either as a PDF document or if it happened to be the true e-invoice that Andrea mentioned, we will take care of it.

So different technology will be used. And I know a lot of the users today are complaining about the manual entry. So if it happened to be the PDF, we would engage our OCR model that would basically scrape the data from the PDF and interpret it and push it into your NetSuite ecosystem. If it happened to be that structured e-invoice, so more structured layout that is shared with you over network, that would also seamlessly flow into NetSuite just using a different technology.

After the invoice is in the we would populate a record to, to suggest to you for processing and create invoice that is undergoing approval flow. So for that we would use the ZoneApprovals application, and then we are getting to the next stage, which is the payments functionality. Towards the end reconciliation is the key key to success for every accountant, right?

So daily reconciliations are encouraged. With ZoneReconcile you can achieve that. So we would basically go back and check if we have already paid the, the particular supply invoice in question. So that's the AP flow without the purchase order.

The second flow is including a purchase order in question. The flow is exactly the same. However, there is a step before ZoneCapture can actually do its job, which is in my first part of the flow. You can see it there mentioned as the PO creation that can be steps before someone may have raised a purchase request or maybe purchase requisition, which turned out to be a purchase order in the system.

The PO is shared with the supplier. Based on that, they issued a vendor bill. Inside our company, we have also confirmed the receipt of the goods. So how does this process change differ from the previous one, is that now we are making a comparison between three different records being the purchase order, the the item receipt and the vendor bill itself. The following steps are all the same leading up to the reconciliation.

So the second use case I'm going to show you today is the use case where we are comparing these three records. And I will also show you the flexibility of the tool to decide different discrepancy tolerances and so on.

Leading up to my favorite reconciliation. So just to clarify, this is about. Banks. This is about credit cards. This is about all your payment provider statements. What you really want to do with this process. It doesn't have to be linked to your month end close only. This is a, you know, step you can take on a daily basis, weekly ba weekly basis.

It's where you are comparing your bank statement with the ERP system. So we have a way to actually help you automate those bottleneck or, or remove those bottlenecks in your AP flow as well as in your AR flow where we are. We have different ways to actually interpret the bank statement data and match it off with your ERP transactions.

So first off as we mentioned, we fully focus on NetSuite. So all our applications are built within the walls of NetSuite. You see me logged in as an administrator.

I'm using this role just for the purpose to also show you the backend of the application. Typically, we would customize your ap, ap or current roles, maybe your AP clerk, a AP manager type of role. So we would actually give you those permissions to control the applications in questions. What you can see on my main dashboard is a ZoneCapture portlet. You can also see my ZoneApprovals portlet.

So in the first one, what I see is a number of transactions coming in that are waiting for processing. You can also see that I already processed one transaction this month. The difference between these two is, this is a suggestion from OCR, not any not having any GL impact yet. This is already processed.

In terms of invoicing, if you ask about AP process, what's the change management internally? Basically it's the same processes, same flow, same application. It's just, the difference will be that the invoice landed up in the, my NetSuite account via a network rather than being forwarded to me as, as a PDF.

In terms of bottlenecks around approving and having visibility into approvals, if I'm a, a NetSuite user, perfect. I have my fancy dashboard here. I can check all the num, you know, all the transactions that are pending in my name. I can also see that all of them I'm late with approval because there is an overdue reminder for me set. And if I'm set as a team manager such as I am right now, in my case, you can also see all the teams pending approval transactions.

Now let's have a look at ZoneCapture and what is the the main portlet that the AP clerk will interact with? It's driven off a saved search so it can be also adjusted to your needs. What you're looking at right now is, is pretty much out of a box, how you would see it if you install it from day one. But like I said, many customers, they like to change the way they view this. They can even, you can even as a user decide a different views or like this about it. The flexibility is there. You can certainly also help with some sort of different, different formatting.

If there's a specific record that you are looking at to use, you can also just use this search button over there so it gives you exactly what you need when you need it. And then this is super useful for larger teams. If you are more than three people working on the queue, you pretty much would appreciate that. You can leave each other notes and you can, everybody can work with the data the way they need, so you are not dependent on one pre default setup. But everybody can set their own rules. So this is the flexibility around this.

Now, I promise to start the demo with a use case, which is not related to any purchase order. And for that I use a utilities bill. I guess all of us receive one or ano one way or another sort of utility bills, maybe rent. This one is electricity bill, so one thing you will notice that. This is already prefilled for me. So the bottleneck, number one, too much manual entry. This is removed by the OCR actually suggesting to you all these key details. Certain values will be there always by default, such as the reference numbers, the total amounts you see. This is also helping me to recognize the data right when I click on it.

However, there will be always some special cases because every NetSuite customer decided their own layout, their own template, the data they need. So you can also help the system, in this case understand what your suggested data for coping would be. We call it adult learning. You can engage this on things like free text form in a memo field. This could be also utilized for let's say, dropdown menu. So if you had, for example, the request the employees in question for whom the this service has been purchased, you can also copy paste the name and then we would be automatically selecting the employees name from the list.

This can be achieved by simply user telling the tool to pick it up from this field, this could be also achieved with a smart way of utilizing generative AI.

What I did in this particular use case, I wanted to showcase the flexibility of actually splitting the lines. So not only do I have some automatic suggestion by a genAI, suggesting me different GL coding, that's option A. You could potentially also hard code simple rules that will be picking up the right segments. So not only the GL codes, but also the segments for you automatically. You could use generative AI for other purposes, such as translation. So if this was in French, and my French is, is, is very elementary and I needed help with the translation, generative AI could be my little assistant. That just helps me with interpreting the data into the language that I speak.

Now, like I said, this is not linked to any purchase order. This particular supplier invoice is linked to a purchase order. So the situation on the lines is different. I'm no longer dealing with GL codes. I'm basically having a, a, a template before that. So the purchase order lines are making up this form. So anything that you hardcoded on the purchase order level, such as your segmentation or the line level, maybe in the header level there's a project number you mentioned. We inherit the template, so being native in this case really helps because we will not ask you to do double work or repeat the data. There's no copy to a a different system.

And in this case, we will run a process of three-way matching. The three-way matching in this case has already picked the, the items that that's all I, I needed to actually compare it with what I can also do is, is set different sort of comparison. So for example, having a, a tolerance that is just working for this item. The tolerances could be set also on, on a supplier level.

I will now quickly switch to the supplier account itself because there's certain setup that can be introduced and I think it's super useful. So if you are already familiar with Zone and how we operate, you also know that we would take your records as they are in NetSuite and we would enhance them in a way. So you see this is a regular vendor card or supplier account, and we edit these additional fields for ZoneCapture. And one of those fields could be that basically I have a, a different way of understanding the data when it's a comparison between PO item received and vendor bill

Those tolerances can be set here in terms of thresholds. So what is acceptable threshold, and if it not, it fails this verification triggers and additional approval on my site. It could be also simple tolerance set for quantities or rates.

So if we have internal policy, we wouldn't hire a consultancy company and if they started to charge us, I don't know, 10% more than it's our tolerance, this will set an alarm back to the team that this is not an acceptable bill and we need to go back to the supplier to dispute it. So additional settings when it comes to threeway matching is, is definitely a highlight.

I do have a, a supplier invoice already saved for your reference. So what I wanted to actually show you is how we how we work with this with with this data. So after we have saved this supplier invoice, first of all, my approval flow is already kicking in. So you see, if I was the user that is meant to approve this record, I have now several ways of, of doing so.

If I'm the NetSuite user, fine, come in here. I have those approve and reject buttons because I also have an additional advanced feature here to redirect my approval. If for some reason this landed up on my desk, but I needed a verification from a different user, I can redirect it to them with this button.

And at the same time if I needed to dig a little deeper into you know, how was it, you know, why was it booked the way it is, we would have this option to look at three-way matching basically differences. So based off this three-way matching summary, you see some lines have been highlighted already for me. You see also blue lines. That means that my purchase order has not been fully built or there were extra lines included on the bill itself. They were not there on the purchase order.

All of this these insights are really good for the team to actually see how, how often does this happen? We have these discrepancies and you, you can set better internal rules around it so you can prevent those discrepancies or additional approval flows that can basically, you know ,slow you, slow you down, and that's definitely not what you want.

So by the time I'm I'm already here. I also wanted to show you the logic of our ZoneApprovals application. The way this has actually triggered the approval is based off a matrix. So if you ask, how does a Zone approval actually differ from the other net NetSuite approval options is that you set tolerances. And then on top of that you have a matrix.

That matrix defines the criteria that are setting the, the, the approval flow to be run by. So not only you, can you mention a name. So in here you see it picked my name specifically. You can also set up different criteria. Let's have a look at that example here.

So it's a very basic table. All you have to say is. Which subsidy would you like this to be active on? What record would you like to see this active on? Those record types could be different, could be not only bills, could be journals from the AP perspective, could be the purchase order itself.

And in here it already loaded for me those tolerances, so it's, you know. We always have an approval flow in place. Everything up to 1k or more. There's a different group and, like I said, could be a specific username, could be a group of people, could be someone using a standard, a NetSuite role of of senior executive.

The triggers can be different as well. So it could be a trigger on those three three very much tolerances differences. So if you said, you know, everything that is more than 50 euros, and in this case GBP, then the, the set results could trigger an approval flow. It could be a segmentation. So anytime somebody pick the specific project, somebody pick a specific department. So there's a variety of options. How these Zone approvals can be, can be triggered.

Now back to the user. So I explained to you that I'm NetSuite user. It's very comfortable for me to just log in here and approve. If I happen to be also employee center user with I would be able to actually approve transactions in mass. So in a bulk approval option from there. The third option is something I would like to show you as well is if I enabled myself to receive an email notification, I could also approve directly from that email.

So see this, this is fully customizable. Would have your logo on it, the text on it, and in here what I get is the OCR skin itself. But at the same time, what I also get from NetSuite is how the bill has been booked. So again, this goes back to being native. We would have that information already in place and for the user's comfort, all they would have to do now is reply to the email and let us know if you are happy with this transaction to go forward or not.

So in terms of approvals, basically once the the records are done, the next step as said would be the payments. Once the payments have happened, we would know about them based on the bank statement. So the reconciliation is where you are getting those statements into the system. In the form of you know, different file formats that we recognize out of the box, we recognize about 15 different file formats that bank populate globally including CAM 53 files, MT 940 files, CSVs, of course, and, and on, you know, there's a full list available on our knowledge base.

Then once the bank statement is in the system, and that can be done in different in different ways. You know, either you establish a connection with your bank or you just get those manual uploads and, and you store them in your file cabinet. Either way, when the file is included in your NetSuite, this is what it looks like.

So you would see a bank statement record. In, in which it shows you what bank account you're reconciling, which subsidiary belongs to, what's the period you're reconciling, and then it's going to always automatically calculate for you to the, the end balances.

Every single new imported bank account will update your bank balance automatically. The key message here is this, is, this can be set up to a very high level of automation in which all transactions that have been in your bank state bank statement are actually matched off with your ERP system.

So the very first one is an AP transaction. It's a vendor bill in the system. It will come up as unpaid.

And what's the job of the application is to actually create the, the, the payments automatically. So the change here to remove the bottleneck with reconciliation is that you do not need to create all these transactions. Auto manually ever again. We can do this for you as long as we know its transactions to match to which can be established in different in different options.

Sometimes it's really driven off the description. Sometimes it's purely about the amount itself. Sometimes all you need is this little help of finding us finding out which customer or supplier we are dealing with. And then you always have the option to actually dig deeper in your accounts and, and see the history and then make the call yourself.

So this might have been just a prepayment, maybe that information lives somewhere in your inbox. Well, there you go. If this is a prepayment, fine, let's do it. This is a 75% paid of my supplier invoice. I do not want to close this particular vendor bill, so I will just keep it open. Record this first prepayment, and I will chase the customer for the remaining 25%.

So all you need in this case is, is a smart system that understands your data, reads it up, compares it for you, and then all the rest is up to the user to set up the, the system to for a high automation level.

This could be an example of bank fees. You know, every bank statement will include it, bank interest or recurring fees. For that we have a smart way of creating custom matching rules like this one, for example, automatically picked up for me, this GL account. This could also be cleverly set for other things. So we mentioned EFT payments, right? So let's say I had a bunch of those invoices that I just generated with ZoneCapture, all have been approved.

Now the bank file has been, or the payment file has been shared with the bank. Now, what the bank returned back to me is a confirmation of that weekly payment.

What I do not want to do now is. Actually going back to that list of 500 or 5,000 different invoices and journalists and all of that. What I really want the system to be smart enough is to recognize this particular payment and let me choose the batch.

So just recognizing the total batch and even if we use something like an I transit payment function, so. All the payments have not been posted yet fully. That's fine. We can still work around that. But just to let you know, this is this is a really key to success of any accounting team, having that flexibility to actually you know, stay away from manually creating transactions but rather have a smart system that can recognize them and, and help you with automatic posting.

So, while this is loading I also would like to just mention one final thing. It is maybe a little teaser, is that we have smart ways of, of getting those statements in automatically at the moment, SFTP a great way to actually connect with your bank. We are also bringing a, a great tool of, of connectivity connecting your you know, through, with, with a tool that can connect to your banks feel feel free to ask us for more information. We are super excited about this. Cannot share any timelines as of yet, so that's why I didn't include it in my demo. But there's always something that we are at the lookout for. So we, we will also bring connectivity as part of the solution.

Andrea Boyle: Hey Tereza, really quick. We do have somebody who's asking a question. Figured now would be a perfect time to fire that off. What would be, what would be some of the advantages of ZoneReconcile over NetSuite's native bank reconciliation?

Tereza Yöndemli: Perfect. So I personally work with the NetSuite reconciliation tool, used to work in NetSuite myself.

So, you see, even in my account, I would have both. I would have both side by side. But I understand the current limitations of the standard NetSuite reconciliation is that you always have to stay, you know, accurate. So that means it's always expecting the client pay exactly how much you ask it to pay.

But there will be always differences in terms of currency, reation, maybe, you know, bank fees were already included by the time they make the payment. The standard NetSuite expects it to be perfect. The world is not perfect. So one of the examples I gave you in my demo is in the popup I was able to select that underpayment. So that's a great. Great start. It doesn't stop me, right? I can still continue chase my customer later. However, I could have also forgiven the customer. So in this case, if I was happy to give away those 25% for a reason, I could just, journal it out with, you know, with automatic posting and just forgive them, those 25%. So it didn't stop me and I showed that I'm flexible enough.

So one of the reasons I would choose ZoneReconcile over standard NetSuite is debt, the flexibility of payment, different reasons. The other one is the flexibility in defining the matching logic. So what you can do with standard NetSuite is, for example, saying, oh, you know what we have, and I believe I had it. Here we have this Norwegian customer, and anytime they pay, they don't bother mentioning the invoice number, but they would always tell me the reference number. So you know, if that reference number was set in NetSuite and we had it on the invoice itself, which in case of Norwegian customers, we might have done it through some automation. Our matching logic can be very, very custom. So another reason why I would pick this.

And the number three reason is anytime you work with other institutions, but banks, let's say PayPal, Braintree, moley, you will always find yourself in a situation that what you see on those order statements does not match what you see on the bank statements. So you need a smart way to adjust your the matching logic there as well.

So, three reasons. My favorite there is. A hundred other reasons, but this is what I would suggest to every customer to consider.

Well my statement just loaded. So here we are. As mentioned, the key role of this application is that this wasn't a manual step. So by the time we started the demo, the invoice has been actually open and it did create the payment for me. What I love about this as well is that it also brought some sort of stamp on the record itself, so it can always tie back to the, the statements. So there's no more discussion about where this payment came from, who created it. Oh, I see. A system created it based of what information did it create? So there's always this stamp back and you see the bill record is now paid in full.

And also all these journals that normally would have to be manually created. Now we have a rule for it. So and I also did not have to order with that you know, doing this, all these bank fees, bank charges, interest, and so on manually.

We will follow your approval logic. So if you want to have these auto-approved, fine. If you still want to this journal to undergo approval, that's fine too.

We can even do things like splitting this particular journal. So if you wanted more robust, multiline journal and have it split by departments, all that can be achieved from within the reconciliation page. We do also support creation of intercompany journal entries. And as you know, in NetSuite, this can be quite cumbersome because all of a sudden this is not only two lines, it's at bare minimum four lines.

And if you are throwing more subsidiaries into the mix, it can get quite, quite complex. So we also can create for you intercompany journals, if that's what your expectation is.

So from the demo perspective, this is all I wanted to cover. If you have any further questions, I'm, I'm here for you.

Andrea Boyle: We do have one more question in the Q&A. You've recently added a new functionality to a new PO threshold at header level (total PO amount, ignoring the lines) can you add a threshold of 3%, for instance, for this type of header threshold?

Tereza Yöndemli: That's a very good question. So indeed this is a new functionality, the way you set it up. You see me doing that in the demo, going to the vendor record, and there's this dedicated section for three-way matching in which you can basically define if it's should. Match on line level, and then you can indeed set those thresholds.

However, to my current knowledge there's no way to set a threshold for the total matching, but it's a, it's a nice idea. I will add it to our improvement list because indeed this might be requested. So for line level, no problem for header level to this is currently. Not an option, but like I said you will have an ability to actually still push through because all we tell you in that pop-up window is, is just a suggestion.

It's not really stopping you from processing the record the way you want.

Andrea Boyle: Wonderful. Thank you all again, Tereza. Thanks for being our special guest today. We really enjoyed having you. You did an amazing job.

Tereza Yöndemli: Thank you so much and thanks for the interesting questions. Like I said, we will take that one away. It's, it was a great suggestions and always welcome, welcoming your suggestions and that's the way we improve and, and, and yeah.

Thanks so much for it.

Andrea Boyle: Thank you everybody. Have a great day.