Down to One Vendor: How AP Automation Turned 10 Hours of Data Entry Into 30 Minutes — Taylor Johnson

<p>Taylor runs AR and AP at Lakeside, and also handles payroll, HR and most of the day-to-day finance work at a small concrete contractor. Before automation, every invoice was printed, walked to an operations manager for coding, then keyed into QuickBooks by hand. That was more than 300 invoices a month and six to ten hours a week of data entry. On this episode of Finance at the Jobsite, Taylor sits down with Rishi Srivastava three months into using Beiing Human to talk about what actually changed.<br />Taylor explains how a field team used to paper got on board (“give it a couple of weeks”), how a QuickBooks version mismatch got sorted during setup, and how line-item extraction finally let Lakeside break out winter concrete treatment costs and speed up change orders. Time spent on AP dropped by 75 to 80%. The bigger surprise was the cash flow effect: with bills reaching the ERP in real time, Lakeside now pays on schedule instead of scrambling to cover bills two weeks late. Last week the AP list was down to a single vendor for the first time in almost three years. Taylor also shares a favorite feature (email auto-forwarding), a wishlist item for grouping line items, and simple advice for any contractor on the fence: just try it.<br />Topics include:</p><ul><li>What AP looked like before automation: paper invoices, hand coding, 300+ manual entries a month</li><li>Getting a paper-first field team to give a new system a fair try</li><li>Working through a QuickBooks version mismatch during implementation</li><li>How line-item extraction separated out winter concrete treatment costs and sped up change orders</li><li>Cutting AP time by 75 to 80%: from 6–10 hours a week to about 30 minutes</li><li>The cash flow effect nobody expected: paying bills when they arrive, not two weeks late</li><li>Getting the AP list down to a single vendor for the first time in nearly three years</li><li>Why email auto-forwarding is the feature that makes AP “mindless”</li><li>How project managers now see invoices and coding the way AP does</li><li>Advice for contractors on the fence about AP automation: just try it</li></ul><p>Finance at the Jobsite is hosted by Rishi Srivastava, Co-Founder and CEO of Beiing Human, AI-powered accounts payable automation for construction contractors.</p>