Year-end, without the scramble: Automating AP and reconciliation in NetSuite

Join Andrea Boyle and Monica Sewell from Zone & Co to see how finance teams are using NetSuite-native AP automation and reconciliation to wrap up the year faster and with total accuracy.

In just 30 minutes, you’ll see how ZoneCapture, ZoneApprovals, and ZoneReconcile work together to:

• Clear invoice backlogs before the audit rush.
• Automate approvals and reconciliation to hit your close deadlines with confidence.
• Deliver real-time cash positioning.

‍

Transcript

‍

Andrea Boyle

Hello, everybody. Welcome to our session today.Talking about that year end without the scramble, all about AP and reconciliation. Just want to quickly run through a few things before Monica jumps into a wonderful demo.

My name is Andrea Boyle, Senior Product Marketing Manager here at Zone & Co. Just a little bit about myself.I have over 20 years' experience in technology and software and over 14 years in marketing, over 9 years in product marketing.

I'd like to introduce my cohost, the fabulous Monica, a Senior Solution Consultant here at Zone & Co. Monica, I'll let you introduce yourself.

Monica Sewell

Yes. Thank you, Andrea.

Hey there. Monica Sewell, Senior Solutions Consultant here at Zone & Co. Been here for about 4 years. Been in the whole space of ERP financial things, software for about a decade. So excited to show you guys around our product.

Andrea Boyle

Thank you, Monica.

So we have a lot to go over today. Just to before we get too far into this, just want to start off a few house keeping items. Today's session, we disabled the chat just to keep things focused on the presentation. However, there's that Q&A feature. We do encourage you to submit your questions. If you see something, you want to ask a question, we have moderators standing by. We'll be ready to answer your questions. And if for whatever reason, if you have a lot of questions and we can't get to them today, we will reach out to you after the event.

But just a quick, here's our agenda. Just for those of you who are new, we're going to introduce you to Zone & Co, just do a quick overview. And then we're going to talk about the realities of year-end close, and why it's so challenging on AP and reconciliations, you know, especially with so much manual work still happening in the manual. The majority of the session will be spent on the demo, and then we're leaving time for Q&A. But before the end of the demo, we are going to share a special announcement with you. So stay on this webinar to learn.

If you're new to Zone, welcome. At Zone, we extend NetSuite across all major finance workflows from billing, AP, payroll, bank connectivity, reconciliation, reporting, and AI-driven insights. That's important for this session as it is AP and reconciliation focused. Again, we are built natively in NetSuite, and that allows us to enable teams to automate everything from that invoice cash capture, move approvals faster, and reconcile cash in real time, all which directly impacts close time lines, especially at the year end.

So let's talk about that year end reality. When we talk to controllers and accounting teams as they're preparing for the year end, these challenges come up again and again. Invoices get backlogged, building up right when you need clean numbers; approval slowdown at the exact movement, reporting deadlines get tighter. And reconciliation delays create blind spots in cash and audit readiness. Teams end up spending hours chasing invoices, fixing errors, stitching together data that should already be aligned. Year-end puts pressure on every part of the process, and those pressures expose every manual gap in AP and reconciliations.

So this is where automation makes a measurable difference, especially when everything runs inside NetSuite. With automating invoice capture and approvals, you can clear the invoice queue before the audit start and eliminate that back and forth. Daily reconciliations become possible, which means no more month-end or year-end pile ups. You get cleaner cash visibility, fewer errors, and far less rework. And because everything is happening in one system of record, NetSuite, the close feels controlled instead of chaotic. This is what enables finance teams to move into year end with confidence.

So with that being said, I'm going to let Monica jump right into her beautiful demo.

Monica Sewell

Sounds good. Thank you so much, Andrea.

Okay. Let's go ahead and get into it. I think everybody should be seeing my screen now, which is awesome. Awesome. Awesome. Alright.

So right within the walls of NetSuite, we are. What does this mean, Monica? Nowhere else to log into. You're coming right into NetSuite every single day to access that ZoneCapture, ZoneApprovals, and ZoneReconcile, reconcile all of your dashboards, customizations, personalizations that you already have working in NetSuite, your tax systems, custom scripts, flows, those will remain intact. We are just a bundle of records installed into the NetSuite instance for all three of those Capture, Reconcile, and Approvals.

And we'll work our way through all of those. But right here, we're going to log into NetSuite every day. This is where we're going to see starting with ZoneCapture. All of my bills that my vendor would have emailed to me in a PDF file format are going to come directly into NetSuite. I don't have to do anything. I'm just going to sit here and click into my incoming portlet, which is where we're going next, and then I'm going to just validate.

And what are we validating? We're validating that Zone & Co did all of the manual entry for me. Right? I'm going from having to, you know, manually type in those bills, being very prone to errors, you know, pivoting back and forth between tons of monitors to get those bills into everything seamlessly coming right here into NetSuite easily for me.

So daily, every day, I'm going to click into my incoming portlet. When I do, I'm going to be brought to a screen that's going to show me all of the bills that my vendor has now emailed me or vendors have emailed me. I'm going to see them laid out here nice and neat for me. I've got few options, processing, rejecting it. I'm going to see my status Zone  is going to tell me, hey, we've got the bill, but what vendor is this? I'm going to be able to rectify that and resolve that nice and seamlessly. Just showing you everything is here nice and neat and laid out for you.

I can pop into the PDF and see exactly what it is I'm looking at without having to go toggle through my AP inbox. Just everything is right here on the screen available for me to easily access. Just so user friendly, nice and clean, createddate, type, if it's a bill or a bill credit because ZoneCapture can absolutely handle that as well. Purchase orders, we'll talk about and look at an example of how we handle that 3-way matching is there. Your purchase order status, document number, date, invoice amount. And by the way, if you think these are boring and you don't need to see them, you can absolutely adjust this to however you like to see it. I can hide the column. I can also move these if I needed to or wanted to. So again, just so much flexibility. Each user’s can look differently.

System alert. This is us telling you, hey. We've seen this. We've seen this PDF before. And once we do, we can click into it. We can, you know, gather some information here and see exactly what's happening with it. You'd see a link where you're able to click in and view that bill. It's thinking about it this morning, so maybe if it there it goes. Would I be able to click into this ID, and I'd be able to see exactly what we think is a duplicate? And, you know, the OCR is sharp. We're capturing over 90% plus, you know, best in breed OCR. So we're able to tell you that we've actually seen this bill before. So, again, just those system alerts.

You might also see something like this, a bank detail mismatch. And, again, this is us just being your eyes on the ground. We're telling you, hey. We read this on the bill, but next week says this, flag, flag, flag, go look at this because you might not be able to pay this bill. Vendors could change their bank account information or we could need an update, you know, on our vendor record, and we're going to tell you about it. So you've got a nice assistant pumping in the back for you there.

Memo field is just giving you the opportunity to write into, those memo fields and keep up with what's happening on your dashboard here. You know, a good example is I'm awaiting a vendor resend, waiting for a purchase order approval, and then current editor is telling me who's in a bill at a specific time. Monica's in this bill. The line would gray out until you can't access the bill.

Right here from our dashboard, we've also got filters. Again, every user can look differently. Maybe I'm only processing for my Canadian subsidiary because Zone can handle multiple subsidiaries. We don't have a limit on that. So if you have a large organization and you're processing anywhere from 500 to 5,000 bills, we've got you there with all of those different subsidiaries. But maybe I only want to see Canada for a second here. Or I'm only responsible for Canada. I can set up those filters as many as I need to or want to.

The filters are sticky, so you don't have to set them every time you log in. You're saying, I just want to see Canada. Just allows every user to have access to all, but segregate their duties there. And then I can remove it if I need to or want to.

So from here, let's go ahead and take a look at a bill. Remember, bill has come in. Now I need to just validate what's happening. I do a simple click of process. Once I do, I'm brought to that famous side by side screen, which, by the way, I can hide. We have a lot of our users who would say, oh my gosh. I'm so used to this view. Can I get rid of the other one? Absolutely.

This is nice so you can have that side by side to see where we pull the data from. And you can see all of my data has populated for me nice and easily. I didn't have to do anything. I didn't have to type anything in. I'm not worried about fat fingering, you know, anything and having typos. Again, reducing those human errors that we all do. I've got ZoneCapture doing that work for me.

And I can extend that capability maybe in the memo field every time a bill comes in, I want to capture the account number, for example. Right? So I can click and point. That's our clickable PDF functionality, which allows you to click and point into any data on, the bill and capture it nice and easily. And then Zone’s going to remember, oh, whenever I see dish, they want to see this in the memo field or this data in this field, this field, this field because guess what? If you've got custom fields, we can absolutely support that. So your environment may look differently, and just know that your custom fields that you have working now will be supported.

And then this is just you clicking in any additional information that we didn't maybe capture from the from the actual bill, the invoice, the PDF there. Maybe I need to send this to engineering. Maybe I need to send it to this specific class, location, practice. And once I start clicking and pointing, now I've got a new assistant who's entered the scene, who's entered the chat, who's going to start remembering, oh, Monica. You know, 80% of the time, she's clicking this to engineering in this class, in this location.

That is our GenAI capability, being that personal assistant for you, recognizing when we have a repetition across, our different fields that we're pointing into. And then it'll be once we have 80% data, then we can start plugging in those fields for you as well. So, again, just so many different tools to help support you reducing that manual entry.

I can pull this one amount into two different GL accounts. I can split it across different allocation or allocations and do a 50% split. This is one of many ways that I can set up automatic coding for my GL, and I've got all of that working for me. And then once it's good to go, I'm simply going to save that bill.

And now Zone is going to start kicking off some new set of rules. It'll first tell me, hey. This is a duplicate. Again, just another layer of protection for you, and it is because we are in Monica's demo environment. But now that the bill has saved, we'll see a few things kick off.

Number one, while it's saving, we'll see from that incoming portlet, we're going to go take that bill over to a process this month. This is where all of the bills are going to come and hang out for easy access throughout the month. Just having your back covered there.

We also are going to see some approvals start to kick off for us. And so ZoneApprovals is going to allow you to be able to keep up with what's happening here right here within your dashboard. Nice and simply, I can see, you know, what's happening in my approvals, what's my team's approvals, what are, you know, what's happening across the subsidiary, for example. So I've got visibility into what's happening there.

I've also got a portlet. And when I say portlet, I mean, you see how I can move this around so I can move this on anywhere on my screen. But I've got a place, a dashboard, where now I can keep up with all of my bills or all of my purchase orders right here within screen. This allows me to have easy access to those bills, and be able to quickly perform a mass approve, a mass reject if I needed to or wanted to as well.

So while it's thinking about it well, there we go. But here we are, and this is where I can take quick action. So you guys see how I can just click in, and maybe that one's a reject and maybe this one is a yes. And I can easily just show the PDF there. I can, hit the plus sign and see the breakdown of the GL coding. All of my details are there. Think about some of you guys who are approving multiple approvals over the day, over the week. And from here, I can easily access those approvals, check them off, and click submit and go on from there.

Back to that bill, now that it's in a pending approval, once I submit it for approval, now that dashboard that we just saw is going to be updated. Now, also, I'm going to get an email approval. ZoneApprovals with email is going to allow you to be able to have non-NetSuite users be a part of the approval conversation. And, you know, you think about, hey. You know, you know, Monica is over in product. I don't need her in NetSuite coding everything. Right? But I do need her to approve this bill for this massive event in New Orleans once it hits $20,000. This is where this comes into play, approvals with email, standard with our ZoneApprovals product. And, again, I get an email. I'm going to be able to quickly, approve or reject right there from within screen. I'm going to see an attachment of what it is I'm actually approving, breakdown of GL coding, and so forth there.

And then again, once I approve it or reject it, that approval will come directly back over into NetSuite, and I will see an audit trail here. Same bill, same single source of truth here, but I see, sort of that tagging, that audit trail there that first it goes to Monica, then it goes to Jennifer, then it goes to Dave, and everything is tagged for me right here within NetSuite. So, again, you've got so many ways to approve from that dashboard via email.

You've also got right here. I like to call it the legacy way. I can just view the bill and approve or reject or redirect that approval and pivot outside of my flow here, my flow of Monica, Jennifer, and Dave. How I knew to do Monica, Jennifer, and Dave here is a simple and powerful matrix. This is the logic behind our flow. It is so highly customizable, so flexible.

Our matrix allows you to just plug in the subsidiary or subsidiaries that you're working with. Maybe the same folk need to approve across, various, subsidiaries, and it just makes it simpler there. We're talking about approvals for vendor bills, but look at all of these records that we support. Expense reports all the way down to sales orders, purchase regs, advanced intercompany journals, all there for you.

Got your currency there that you can plug in. So those of you who are working with multiple currencies, just know that we can support you end to end from ZoneCapture all the way through to, reconcile and including our approvals here, what we're looking at. Our hierarchy, start and end days. We've got overdue thresholds, bottleneck preventions here that you can set up to expire this matrix so that people aren't, you know, having a, vacation and they don't and they're just sitting there, the approval, so we can prevent that.

And then we can plug and play. Bills come in and they're less than this amount. This is who it goes to. I can set this up by roles. I can set my approvals up via groups. So many different ways, a specific vendor. I can go deeper.

Remember I told you it's so flexible and customizable. Maybe my needs are bill comes in for this department, take it here, there, and the other. Bill comes in for this department, location, and class, take it here, there, and the other. What about those of you who have custom fields? You know, bill comes in for this amount for this project, custom field of project, for this customer ID for we can support that as well. And this is all right within the walls of NetSuite and a seamless flow from that bill all the way through to your approval.

So that is the logic behind ZoneApprovals. So much more there that we can unpack and pack and help, you set up your specific needs that you would have, for your approvals, but highly flexible, highly customizable so that you can quickly get those approvals to the applicable people, again, right within the walls of NetSuite.

Back over to ZoneCapture, just one more thing to show you here. What about Monica, I have purchase orders. We can absolutely handle those purchase order related bills, and it can be multiple. We can handle one bill, multiple purchase orders. In the inverted version of that too is, you know, one purchase order. Multiple bills are coming in. We're highly flexible with that as well.

But in that instance, Zone is going to help you match what did you order, what did you receive, and what are you being billed for. And so we look at a bill. We're familiar with this already from our previous example, but look. Now you have a new button for 3-way matching.

When I click into it, Zone said, this is what you ordered on the purchase order. This is what you received. This is what you're being billed. We're bringing them all together here under this one house so that we don't have to figure out what's happening. Zone's going to give you a visual.

And how many of you are you know, this team is entering a purchase order. A whole another team in another country even is entering in item receipts. Well, my AP team is going to be able to flex all of those various silos, bring them under one house of operation here so that I can quickly pay these bills in the end. And I'm going to see any discrepancies that I may have.

Hey. Line and amount aren't matching. Oh, we read this on the bill. And then the team would simply be able to go ahead and add that on, allowing for 100% match submit it. And now all of our, end to end with what did we order, what did we receive, what are we being billed are all on one place so that now we can save the bill and keep it moving.

So, again, just handling your 3-way handling your purchase order related bills with our 3-way match. And even what's coming up is highly customizable 3-way matching, beyond what you're seeing now. So lots of things happening there. And, again, just helping you to support your business.

Okay. So let's talk about let's wrap up our product tour by talking about ZoneReconcile and how our tools can help you to your year end with ease. So first and foremost, to belabor the point right within the walls of NetSuite. Again, that ZoneReconcile is. And, of course, we're built to help you reconcile bank transactions within NetSuite.

And so where you are now, you know, we go from mainly pulling in those transactions, mainly matching them up, and then creating their associated transactions to automatically sourcing those files from the bank. And we're going to automatically match those to their associated NetSuite transactions. Right? And so with that bank connection, we not all not only do we receive all of the bank transactions automatically, but you can also set up a cadence. So maybe monthly, weekly, daily. Right?

So back out to our dashboard here, I can see over here under reminders, for example, I can see that I've got, something here to process. We'll come back to it, and this is going to allow me to see what statements have automatically been sourced in. Right? And so when we click in, when we access our ZoneReconcile dashboard, here, I'm looking and I can see all of the banks that I have set up. I can see them summarized. I can drill down into them easily, and it just allows me to have all access to my bank balances on the fly without having to actually log in to those banks.

So I get to see all of those having perfect visibility. And, of course, to belabor the point of, you know, sourcing in those statements automatically as well, I can link my bank account easily here, and we're using Plaid. So I can, you know, click in to link that bank account, and it'll take me here where I can set up and select which institution I'm using. So easy set up there.

Back over to my dashboard here, with the or back over to this dashboard, I can see again, you know, alright. I've got some statements to process. And, again, they've been automatically pulled in. They've been matched against their next week transactions. And now this is where we can handle any exceptions.

So anything that wasn't automatically matched to, or maybe, you know, there are things that I needed to code differently. For example, if I just click into it, it'll take me to a bank statement. But, you know, anything that I needed to code differently, GL accounts for journal entries, we can handle those, with just a couple of clicks. And we can also reconcile things like, you know, those PSP accounts. So your PayPal, your Stripe, your also your credit cards.

And then once we reconcile, we also would create those associated transactions. So if we're matching up a statement line to a vendor bill, we can create vendor bill payments. So if we're receiving cash against an invoice, we can create customer payments. Just all of that amazing stuff.

So just looking at our bank statement tab, again, we click to it straight from our dashboard. We have a statement that was automatically pulled in. We did all the work for me, did all the work for me, and this is now where I can just manage by exception. I mean, we've got all of our header information that holds the currency bank transaction range, all of the amazing stuff that we need. And then right on and then on the lines, you know, we have the actual statement lines.

So, you know, just to give you a scroll down of all of the details here, we've got everything listed here for you. And, there's, you know, absolutely ways that you can pull in additional data points if you wanted to as well. Again, just right within the walls of NetSuite. So if you're thinking like, I want to see this specific field or column, that has been done and is absolutely available.

And then if I scroll back just to point you're there's lots to look at here, and we'd love to show you more in a in a highly customized demo, but we were just look at our transaction column. This is where I was telling you, you know, this is where our transactions are automatically being matched against those statement lines. Right? And then we show you exactly what transactions in NetSuite relate to those statement lines.

And this is also where if we were to look at an example of a bill, we just look at, another example here. We see Zone pulling in, that specific transaction matching it to, say, an open bill, meaning no payment exists in NetSuite using, say, a reference number, transaction number, or document number. And then once this statement is saved, so this is our rather I'm jumping ahead, but this is our ability to easily sync and match those NetSuite transactions so that you can pivot back. And then once that this bank statement is saved, we'll create the corresponding bill payment.

ZoneReconcile also has matching rules that you can utilize, and this is where you could create custom, logic that ZoneReconcile would then apply to certain recurring date statement transaction lines. And then, you know, that rule would match to your specified transaction. So, again, just that end to end sync on your AP automation.

And then just, you know, the the line level control. Right? I mean, if I'm just looking here, you know, under select, you know, you'd see this is telling us which lines are completely matched and require no further investigation and here and yes and then, you know, which don't. And so this is, again, allowing me to just have so much control at each different line.

And we also handle, you know, different other there's other tools, you know, like intercompany business. Right? Transfers and posting. So, you know, I can select the intercompany subsidiary and the account as well. And so definitely a fly by. There's so much more that we can dig into.

This is kind of a high level bread and butter of the Reconcile product that we're sourcing that bank in automatically for you, referencing those values that we popped in and then allowing you to manage by exception with deep line-level control. All of those transactions are created, and then the reconcile is the reconciliation is filed away. And, again, there is more to show and tell, and we love, love, love to meet you in a personalized a more personalized demo to chat more on those features. But for now, we'll leave it there on reconciliation.

So we also spoke about 2 other solutions. Right? ZoneCapture to seamlessly alleviate the manual work of bill entry and a high power, extremely flexible, extremely customizable, ZoneApprovals to easily route approval so that transactions avoid bottlenecks. Right? So peak finance without friction.

Okay. So that is our product tour, our demo for ZoneCapture, Approvals, and then ZoneReconcile. Andrea, any questions from anybody?

Andrea Boyle

Thank you.

Monica, let's jump into the Q&A then. Do you have any pending questions?

Monica Sewell

Let's see. Let's see. Okay. I see one. Okay. Does is there reporting for ZoneReconcile? Yes. There is. So, you do have that here, available to you. You know, if I pop into a reconciliation report, for example, I'd be able to select my account, and I'd be able to see the reconciliation that just took place in a summary form. And I can summarize, and I can drill down into my debits and credits, etcetera.

So, yes, there is reporting for ZoneReconcile.

Andrea Boyle

Alright.

Monica Sewell

Let's.

Andrea Boyle

you.

Monica Sewell

see. Yeah. I don't think I see anything else so far.

Andrea Boyle

No. Alright. So with that being said, Monica, can I share my screen for a moment?

Monica Sewell

Of course.

Andrea Boyle

Thank you. Alright. So we do have thank you everybody for attending our webinar today. We hope you've learned a lot of great information about how ZoneCapture, Approvals and Reconcile can really help you with your year-end close, really just kind of making sure you get ahead of all the noise because it can be a very stressful time.

Whether your year end is the December or March, February, just, you know, making sure you have the right tools in place can help you. Now with that being said, we are going to be sharing. We do have a new feature coming into the market very soon. Zone AP Payments is going to help complete that process. You've already seen capture. You've seen approvals. Well, next is going to be the payment process.

So once you finish that invoice approval, now capturing the payment directly in NetSuite. It will both support not just domestic payments, but global payments with a real time FX conversion. So this way, you'll be able to see on the screen and pay in different currencies. It's really going to improve the workflow for AP staff, just from the full AP life cycle. And it's going to help we're hoping to see this come out in the next few weeks, so please keep following us.

If you'd love to get a demo or you'd like to talk to a sales rep, please fill out the form at the end of this webinar, and then we'll make sure somebody gets in touch with you to show you more. Monica, thank you again. You're amazing. Everybody, thank you for joining us today. Enjoy the rest of your week, everybody.