California Construction Company Goes Paperless with AP Automation
Westport Construction shares how TimberScan Titanium enhances Acumatica and saves time with digital accounts payable (AP)
Vince Wile joined Westport Construction about 10 years ago, evolving from an administrative role on the finance team to a lead decision maker, second to the CFO. He oversees the firm’s AP work with TimberScan Titanium and Acumatica, handling routing and permission setups, onboarding of new users and day-to-day administration of the financial software solutions.
While construction finance is complex and cumbersome with loads of invoices coming in from multiple job sites, Wile can better manage the work thanks to a seamless, automated AP solution from AvidXchange.
The challenge: Managing paper across job sites
Collecting and coding thousands of invoices and routing them through approvals was tricky for Westport Construction, as it is for most construction companies.
“We have job sites across the state and each acts as its own business entity, sending unique invoices for approvals and expecting prompt payments for their suppliers,” said Wile. “Each invoice needs to be routed for appropriate approvals — those for larger amounts requiring additional steps — and coded to the right account and project. It’s an incredibly long, tedious process that’s hard to track and prone to errors.”
The lengthy, often messy paper trail makes it easy for invoices to get lost or attached to the wrong project or account, potentially delaying payments to suppliers and threatening relationships.
As Westport Construction’s business grew, they found that they needed a robust AP solution to automate and speed invoice approvals and enable them to scale.
“Construction isn’t as tech forward as other industries, but innovation is a driving force for our company and we knew that automation would transform our finances and give us an edge over competitors,” said Wile.
Customer Profile
Industry: Construction
Products used: TimberScan Titanium
Accounting system: Acumatica
Founded in 1987, California-based Westport Construction specializes in affordable, multi-family housing. The company is committed to partnering with its clients to deliver projects on time and on budget. With tens of thousands of housing units in its portfolio, Westport Construction has grown to 130 employees, including a 5-person finance team. While the construction business has a reputation for being hesitant to change, Westport Construction is a firm believer that innovation provides game-changing efficiencies and competitive advantage.
The solution: TimberScan Titanium for Acumatica eliminates the paper chase
In January 2022, Westport Construction implemented TimberScan Titanium, a complete purchase-to-pay AP automation solution that seamlessly integrates with Acumatica. The solution streamlines and automates the invoice processing, leveraging optical character recognition (OCR) to replace data entry and match invoices to purchase orders.
“TimberScan Titanium monitors our AP inbox, pulls invoices into the queue, and knows where to send them based on our routing rules,” said Wile. “It’s far easier than doing it manually, saves us a ton of time and keeps us from missing things or coding them incorrectly.”
The cloud-based solution also makes it easy for field personnel to submit, track, and manage invoices anytime, anywhere—even from a jobsite. With a few clicks, they can run monthly reports of invoices and approvals to submit to their clients for reimbursement.
“TimberScan Titanium monitors our AP inbox, pulls invoices into the queue and knows where to send them based on our routing rules. It’s far easier than doing it manually, saves us a ton of time and keeps us from missing things or coding them incorrectly.”
The result: Processing invoices in half the time
Before implementing TimberScan Titanium for Acumatica, Westport Construction’s manual invoice approval process took about four days to complete. Now it takes half as long, and there’s no more searching for lost invoices to print and scan.
The construction company has grown considerably since implementing their AP solution and expects that they would have had to hire another person to assist with the workload if they didn’t have automation to do the work.
“Since moving to TimberScan Titanium, I can log into one dashboard and see everything I need,” said Wile. “I feel safer and confident in our processes, knowing that things are running smoothly and we’re not missing anything. I also know that approvers have current info and that everything is coded to the correct project. That puts me at ease.”
Westport Construction’s supplier relationships also benefit. Streamlined invoice processing means they get paid on time and they no longer have to deal with mailing invoices or hoping they make it from job sites to the office without getting lost.
The construction industry’s back office is a complicated business, but thanks to TimberScan Titanium, seamlessly integrated with Acumatica, Westport Construction’s work is simplified.
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