How to Eliminate AP Bottlenecks and Automate Your Payables in NetSuite

Managing AP in NetSuite should be seamless—but most finance teams are stuck with disconnected tools, manual steps, and workflows that slow everything down.

From coding invoices by hand to chasing approvals and tracking employee expenses across spreadsheets, these gaps don’t just waste time—they delay payments, increase errors, and leave teams in the dark when it comes to cash flow.

In this session, we will walk through the biggest AP challenges finance teams face—and how fully embedded solutions in NetSuite can help solve them. You’ll also see a live demo showing how Zone’s solutions work together to remove friction, reduce manual work, and give your team the accuracy, speed, and control needed to scale.

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Transcript

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Andrea Boyle: Hello, welcome. I'm Andrea Boyle, Senior Product Marketing Manager here at Zone & Co. I'm joined today by Jonny Mesward, one of our amazing Senior Solution Consultants. Thanks for taking the time to join us.

Today's session is all about eliminating the bottlenecks in your accounts payable processes and unlocking inefficiencies inside NetSuite. We'll show you how automation can drastically reduce manual effort, accelerate approvals, and even simplify employee expenses.

So as I mentioned, I am Andrea Boyle, senior Product Marketing Manager, at Zone & Co. Just a little about myself. I have 20 over 20 years experience in technology and software in over 14 years in marketing, eight years in product marketing. And I'd like to introduce today's co-host today, Jonny Messward, our Senior Solution consultant. Jonny, I'll let you introduce yourself.

Jonny Mesward: Hi everyone.

Nice to see you all. I am our solution consultant. I'm going to be showing you the products today. I am an accountant by trade, and I've spent the last seven years as a solution consultant across, largely, the NetSuite space. So it's nice to see you all today.

Andrea Boyle: Thanks for joining us, Jonny. We're looking forward to that demo.

So today just here's what we're going to cover. We're going to start with a little introduction of who we are in case you're new to zone, followed by identifying what's really slowing AP Teams down. Spoiler alert, it's not just the number of invoices.

Then we'll look at how Zone's AP Automation Suite embedded directly in NetSuite can, can eliminate those roadblocks. After that, Jonny's going to walk us through that live demo and we're going to wrap up with a Q&A.

So for those new to Zone & Co, we're not just another software company. We build native NetSuite apps that solve the most painful finance and accounting problems. We have over 4,000 companies globally that trust us and we help them with everything from billing, payroll, AP, approvals, reconciliations. Our products work seamlessly within NetSuite, which means you get automation without having to manage another disconnected tool.

Here's a look at our suite of solutions. Today we're focusing on ZoneCapture, ZoneApprovals, and Zone Employee Portal. But together, these solutions automate everything from invoice capture to approvals to employee expense entry. But it's also to good to know that as your business grows, our platform can support your entire office of the CFO.

So now with that being said, we're going to jump into a quick little poll. So Katie's going to fire up a poll on the screen. Where is your AP process experiencing the most friction today?

At a glance invoice data entry, 47% of our respondents are having slowness and experiencing friction with that process. Approvals and routing. And a lot of people are experiencing problems with all of the above.

So that's a really great segue into this next part of my conversation is really about what's getting in the way of that seamless AP. So before we dive into the solution, let's just take a quick look at what's blocking the progress here.

Almost half of midsize companies still process invoices manually. It's, that's time consuming, it's error prone. On top of that, most finance leaders say they lack realtime visibility into invoice or payment status. That means they're constantly reacting rather than proactively managing cash flow.

And approvals? That's one of the biggest bottlenecks. AP teams spend nearly a third of their time chasing down. Through emails and then adding in expense reports that can be submitted via spreadsheets. It's clear the processes are broken at multiple points.

So the impact of these inefficiencies go far beyond day-to-day annoyances. When your AP process is this fragmented. It doesn't just slow your team down. It limits your ability to plan, forecast, and scale effectively. Manual processes drain time, approvals get stuck, payments are delayed, and finance ends up in the dark. All of that translates to lost money, missed opportunities, and a team that's constantly in catch-up mode instead of leading strategic initiatives.

This is exactly why automation isn't just a nice to have. It's essential. You want your finance to evolve from tactical to strategic. Also, you'll notice in the resource center here in our webinar, we've added a little ROI calculator. It's available for you. I highly recommend anybody on this call looking to kind of understand more about how you're investing your money. Look at that, look and see how you could be implementing more automation to improve things and decrease your cost.

I wanna go ahead and let Jonny jump right into the live demo. Take it away, Jonny.

Jonny Mesward: All right, great. I am going to show you all three of our products, like we mentioned. I'm going to start with our AP automation tool ZoneCapture. So ZoneCapture is an OCR based solution that is going to automate the capture and processing really the, the population of native NetSuite vendor bills inside of NetSuite for you.

So here on my dashboard, I can see that I have a ZoneCapture portlet and I can see my incoming transactions. So these have been processed from our AP email inbox and pre-populated into a queue. So now, instead of our AP staff manually entering these transactions into NetSuite for us, our OCR tool is going to populate these bills for us. And now my job as an AP user is just to validate that what has been captured by the tool is how we want the transaction to post. So we use gen AI to scan all of these incoming transactions. And on this screen, as a AP user, I can work through these and validate that each one of these is captured correctly.

So as I select, as I open these up, I can process and post these, or I can reject them if I don't want them to post as they have been scanned. But as I open some of these up. We will be able to see what the system does.

So here on the left, I can see my PDF that came into our AP inbox and was automatically scanned. And on the right is our native NetSuite vendor bill record. So here everything is pre-populated, again, utilizing Gen AI to understand what is on that invoice and populate this record for us.

And now as a user, my job is just to validate that what has been captured and pre-populated is how we want this transaction entered in the system. So instead of spending four or five minutes typing all of this in manually, we're letting the system do all the legwork for us and using our AP staff in a more value added capacity to just do simple validation.

All of these header level fields are optically recognized from different areas on the PDF. And as we move down, we see our GL lines. Now we can configure the system in a variety of ways, vendor to vendor. Obviously each vendor that you have is going to send a very different format of invoice. The system is very capable to scan and capture across all vendor invoices. And as we tell the system how we want each vendor to post, it will actually generate all of these GL lines for us.

Maybe certain vendors we are posting line by line, like we can see here. Others, maybe we just grab the aggregate total and post that as one GL line. Maybe even others we allocate, we take one bill and we spread it and allocate it across different departments, classes, locations whatever reporting segments we want.

Additionally, we have the ability to build in some visual cues. So I have a rule set up in the system that says, anytime you see the word shipping, go ahead and code that to our freight expense account. And, you know, maybe we even want to predetermine our segmentation for these shipping charges.

So a lot of flexibility vendor to vendor. How we configure the system. Do we want GL line level detail to match the invoice? Do we want to grab the aggregate? Do we wanna allocate, do we wanna build in these sort of visual queues across our business where if the system recognizes certain language on the invoice, we want it coded a specific way.

A lot of flexibility, but at the end of the day. My job as a user instead of entering all of this data simply becomes quickly validating that this is all captured correctly, and I can go ahead and save this.

We also have some functionality layered on top of this for PO related expenses. So if I open up a bill that is related to a purchase order we issued in NetSuite, one of the benefits of being on the NetSuite platform is we really seamlessly can identify those purchase orders in NetSuite, and we can perform a three-way match between what was ordered, what was received, and ultimately what we were billed by the vendor.

So, coming down on this bill. I can see this is related to a purchase order, and if I open up my three-way match screen, we can see that on the left are my PO lines from our NetSuite purchase order. In the middle is my receiving information. And on the right are the lines captured from that bill via that OCR tool. So I can see that these three lines all match any variances would be identified and just help our AP staff determine how we want to move forward giving us this nice visibility and ultimately giving us some further automation as we scale our AP process with purchase orders related. So that is our capture tool at a high level.

Once we save these invoices, maybe we have some approvals downstream that are applicable. So a lot of our customers use our capture tool with our approvals tool. So here on my dashboard, I can see I have various transactions that are at various points in our approval workflow routed to me as well as maybe I'm a manager and I want to keep track of my team's approvals. Make sure that they're managing their processes efficiently as well.

So on this dashboard, I can drill in and I can see which transactions require my approval. I might also be pushed a reminder in NetSuite and something we'll talk about is I can also receive an email notifying me of the approval that's required.

So here is a transaction, as we know in NetSuite, we can reject or approve. You know, as I come down, I can see every transaction now in NetSuite has this ZoneApprovals tab. Where, based on how we have set up our approvals in the tool, we know who is the required approval for this transaction. In this case, I have two approvers.

And how did this transaction get routed to me? We can set up matrices. So here I have an example matrix, just like every company I think is familiar with, where we identify maybe which subsidiary this matrix is applicable to and which record type. So we can set up different matrices for not only vendor bills in our AP process, but let's say we want to use this tool to manage approvals around journal entries, purchase orders, sales orders across the business, any NetSuite transaction we can use this. But for this matrix, this is applicable to our vendor bills.

You can see in our operations department, and as we have maybe different classes, I can see I have different approvers that are necessary. Now up here I just have class and department, but we could add any field that is tagged on a transaction standard or custom fields. Any field that is captured on the transaction we can use as a differentiator.

And then ultimately we can establish what we call hierarchies. So what dollar thresholds are important to us? We might have one or two tiers. We might have five tiers. We can define exactly where these fall, and ultimately the combination of what classifications or different fields are identifiable as well as what dollar value the transaction falls into will determine who is the approver. So I can have named users, I can route to roles- so if we have multiple AP clerks- I can source based on what employee entered a transaction or what vendor sent the bill. So maybe we have different approvers for different vendors.

And our most flexible option is an approval group. So using a NetSuite saved search, we can define criteria that constitute a group of individuals, maybe cross departments, cross roles, really any group of individuals we want to compose, we can name and put together here as an approver.

So really flexible, a lot more flexible than native NetSuite approvals. And something that's really nice about this is not only can these transactions be routed inside of NetSuite like we saw, but we can also configure the tool to route, to these named or otherwise approvers via email.

So this is one thing a lot of NetSuite customers really like is their approvers don't have to be licensed NetSuite users to be identified in one of these matrices and ultimately approved transactions.

So as a transaction gets routed to me, I might see an email that looks something like this. We have a transaction waiting for my approval. I can see all I have to do, it gives me two options. If I am a NetSuite user, I can log into NetSuite and view the transaction like we just saw on the dashboard, or I can respond to this email.

We give the our customers the ability to predetermine which words constitute an approval or a rejection. And now as I open up this email, I can view the PDF. I can see that, yes, this looks good, and I can simply respond to the email with those predefined words so we can make it really flexible. I can just respond: Yeah, this looks great. And now when I send this email, that transaction that we saw in NetSuite is going to be marked for approval.

What this does is it maintains really strong internal control processes while enabling us to utilize the old school efficiency of email based approvals. Also saving us some licensing because, again, now maybe we have some approvers that don't have to be NetSuite users.

Andrea Boyle: Hey Jonny. Before we move on to the next, can we answer some of these questions there? We have some interested people that wanna know. Can the OCR tool read QR code information? It's common in places like Switzerland?

Jonny Mesward: Yeah. Unfortunately our tool is not able to read QR code information that is not a, a capability today. Wonderful.

Andrea Boyle: And then another customer wants to know, or another prospect, I'm sorry. We use items not expenses. Can it be automated where the details link directly to the items instead?

Jonny Mesward: Yes. Absolutely.

Andrea Boyle: Awesome. Thank you so much. And then what happens if the PO exists but not receipted?

Jonny Mesward: What happens if the PO exists but not recepited? Totally fine. We can just compare the PO to what is billed. We don't have to have receiving information for that, for that process.

I do see a couple others that I'll quickly answer. Can we run custom scripts and workflows on the bill before saving the bill or only after? Yes. Well, we save the bill. But then if you want any custom workflows to apply at that point easy enough to do so.

If we are sending pos for approvals, can you set up ZoneApprovals such that a PO raised by a certain employee's auto approved below a certain dollar level? Yes, absolutely. Very common.

Can a third party procurement system be able to pull the ZoneApprovals matrices from NetSuite? These matrices live inside of NetSuite and apply to NetSuite transaction records. So maybe if there's a additional question we can, we can follow up on that. But without having additional context, I'll just say these matrices apply to native NetSuite transaction types.

Okay. Let's keep moving through to the employee portal, this last portion of our AP workflow. So we have our own Zone Employee Portal. With traditional NetSuite expense entry, you had to license your users to that NetSuite employee portal. We give you the ability, a much cheaper option to just license your expense users a Zone Employee Portal license.

And here we can use our mobile phones or you know, our computers to enter these expenses. I'm doing so on my computer obviously today. But here I can see my dashboard, whether I am, whether I have approvals that are required, whether I'm entering expenses and receipts, which is what we're going to show you today. Or we even have a payroll tool associated inside of this product.

But here I'm going to show you how easy it is to enter an expense report. So here I open this up to enter a new expense report. I can give this a name. Maybe this is our January team meeting. I can quickly import some receipts here, and what it'll do is it'll actually use an OCR capability to scan and pre-populate as much information as it can. So you can see here I have a White Castle receipt and it picked up the, the date and the amount, the currency. Maybe as a user, I want to select what category AKA what GL account we're going to code this to. I might quickly leave a memo and I can move on to my next line of this expense report. Let me save that. I can quickly move through this and add as many lines as I want. I can even email these receipts into into the tool and it'll scan them automatically for me. So I can send one big email with 10 receipts and it'll do this scanning. So here again, maybe as simple as an Uber screenshot from the tool. It's picking up information about it, the dollar amount, the date, et cetera. And, again, I simply can code this select the category, add a memo, and save this as well. So pretty quick to move through this tool.

The, the one big differentiator here, again, I've mentioned between us and maybe NetSuite's native tools, is you do not have to be a licensed NetSuite user in any way to use this tool. We license our users to this portal, and so it's a, it's a much more cost effective solution. Really seamless integration with NetSuite. So the result of these expenses that I'm entering when I submit this, ultimately there's going to route through approvals, but it's going to create a native NetSuite expense report.

So the same resulting transaction that a native NetSuite employee portal process would create, but a bit more cost effective. Really good use of the OCR to help me pre-populate some of that. And at the end of the day, as I'm managing these, I can use my dashboard to keep track of any receipts that I have that aren't attached to an expense report. If I am an approver, I can keep track of those. But again, just a, a another simple solution that is well integrated to our native NetSuite processes.

It looks like we have some questions. Can a Zone Employee Portal be set up via single sign on? I'll have to check. I'm, I'm not sure exactly which single sign on you're referring to. We, we do license those separate from the NetSuite user licenses, so likely a different login, but maybe we'll follow up with that.

Can you itemize or split the expense into different categories? Yes, absolutely.

Can you create purchase requests using Zone's Employee Portal? Purchase requests. This is primarily for expense management. So I don't think we manage purchasing through this. This is simply just expense reporting on the backend.

If you want to, if you have certain types of transactions that you wanna bypass, approvals altogether. IE intercompany purchase invoices? Yes, absolutely those approvals we're coming back to the approvals tool on that question. Those can be set up to only apply to the transactions that you want. So certainly any transaction types that you don't want any approvals for, totally fine.

Why can they approver not see the coding for the bills when they should approve? My approvers are very interested in the cost centers. When, when managing those approvals, you can see the coding. I don't know if that's something I showed or not, but, but yeah, on the transaction, your approvers will absolutely be able to see how any transaction is coded via email. Maybe that's what you're referring to in the email. We don't include that because that is just inside of NetSuite. So if, if your approvers do need to view the GL coding, the assumption is they would be a NetSuite licensed user.

Can employees submit expenses via mobile phones? Yes, absolutely. We do have that capability. I'm showing it from the computer, but very easy to take pictures of your receipts on your phone and, and submit those through the tool that way. Really good capability there.

I, I ran through a lot of questions, but just wanted to leave us a moment to wrap up. So really appreciate everyone's time and engagement and if there's. Additional questions that come up feel free. We can always follow up or you know, show you a demo subsequent to this. Get a little deeper.

Andrea Boyle: Well, thank you everybody for joining. Jonny, thank you so much for the wonderful demo. Everybody, have a wonderful rest of your day.