.svg)
The useful accounts payable automation case study is the one that tells you what changed on a Tuesday, not the one that promises a percentage. The six below are MakersHub customers who published their numbers: hours per month before and after, what the work actually was, and who got their time back. MakersHub is built for complex businesses, not complex workdays, and these are the businesses that proved it.
Between them they cover construction, building automation, winery management, pole-building manufacturing, an outsourced finance firm and a solo QuickBooks ProAdvisor. Volumes run from a few dozen bills a month to more than five hundred. Every figure here comes from a published customer story you can read in full.
Six accounts payable automation case studies at a glance
The middle column describes the business, not a category any one of them owns. Several of these teams share the same problems in different clothes.
| Company | What the business does | Headline result |
|---|---|---|
| Cahill Construction | Retail, restaurant, grocery and multi-family renovation, 1,200+ projects | 64+ hours saved per month, credit card reconciliation 4 days to 1.5 |
| Locke Buildings | Pole buildings for commercial, agricultural and residential projects | 40+ hours saved per month, 500+ bills processed digitally |
| Provignage | Operational partner managing a portfolio of wineries | 30+ hours saved per month, 5+ entities on one platform, 3x faster payments |
| O.Z. Enterprises | Building automation systems for education, healthcare and telecom | 8+ hours saved per week, 90 percent reduction in AP time |
| Patrice Diana Bookkeeping | QuickBooks ProAdvisor serving trades and construction clients | 16+ hours saved per month, Tuesday AP from 3 to 4 hours down to 30 minutes |
| Outsourced FinOps | Full-stack finance partner to architecture, engineering and construction firms | 10x reduction in bill processing time, zero manual data entry |
What those hours are actually worth
Hours saved is a soft number until you price it. The US Bureau of Labor Statistics publishes a median wage for bookkeeping, accounting and auditing clerks of $23.66 an hour. Applied to the published monthly savings, that gives a floor:
Two things make that a conservative floor rather than a headline. In three of these cases the person doing the data entry was not a clerk: at O.Z. Enterprises it was the CEO, at Provignage a CPA controller, at Patrice Diana Bookkeeping the owner of the practice. Their hours cost more than the median, not less. And none of it counts the second-order effects that several of them named as the bigger win, like avoiding a hire.
The six stories
1. Cahill Construction: six days a month spent entering bills
Cahill is a family-owned renovation contractor working for brands like Kroger, Victoria's Secret and Tim Hortons, with more than 1,200 completed projects. Their small finance team was spending six full days a month entering bills, chasing approvals and coding costs into QuickBooks. Credit card reconciliation alone took over four days.
They had already built their own approval system in Smartsheet. It worked, and it still left them with double entry and no line-item view of project costs. After moving bills, receipts and approvals across, reconciliation dropped from four days to one and a half, and Cahill saved more than 64 hours a month without hiring additional administrative staff.
President Trey Cahill on the change in cost visibility: “It’s a complete 180. We’re capturing a deeper view of project costs—quantity, price per unit, and line-item details that we never had before.”
2. Locke Buildings: 500 bills a month, and an office manager tied to the office
Locke is a Portland pole-building contractor with 24 employees and more than 3,000 buildings behind them. Office Manager Trina Brockway was spending 10 to 12 hours a week printing bills, walking them around for signatures and keying them into QuickBooks. Project managers approving those bills could not see what was on them, and the context lived in email threads and handwritten notes.
Moving approvals into a system where every bill carries its own line items and notes cut that to about two hours a week. Locke Buildings saved more than 40 hours a month across 500-plus bills. The detail that says most about what changed: Trina now works from home four days a week, because the process is no longer attached to a printer.
3. Provignage: one controller, several wineries, thousands of invoices
Charly Green is a CPA managing AP for a portfolio of wineries. She inherited a fragmented process: manual entry, email approvals, vendors collapsed into single accounts so nobody could see what anything actually cost, and payments through Melio that took up to four days to land.
The fix was line-level capture plus coding rules that map each line to the right account and stay mapped. You set your coding rules once, and MakersHub applies them everywhere. Provignage now saves 30-plus hours a month across five-plus entities with 90 percent-plus extraction accuracy, and payments that used to take three to four days go out next day.
If you are running several companies rather than one, our guide to AP automation built for multiple entities covers what to test for specifically.
4. O.Z. Enterprises: the CEO doing bills on Sunday night
Ryan Birtwell runs a building automation contractor in Pittsburgh that has doubled its revenue and grown from 22 employees to nearly 50. Before MakersHub he personally spent two to three hours every Sunday entering bills into QuickBooks line by line, and some of those bills carried more than 150 line items each, with quantity, price, sales tax and shipping on every one.
That is the situation the phrase "AP bottleneck" usually hides: not a department that is slow, a founder who has no Sunday. O.Z. Enterprises cut AP time by 90 percent and saved 8-plus hours a week. In Ryan’s words: “Because of MakersHub, we haven’t had to hire any additional admin staff — even though we doubled in size.”
5. Patrice Diana Bookkeeping: 91 bills in 30 minutes
Patrice is a QuickBooks ProAdvisor with over twenty years of experience, serving electricians, plumbers, landscapers and construction firms. Her weekly payables run took three to four hours every Tuesday, with double entry between systems and manual coding to jobs and customers.
Two-way sync removed the double entry, and line-item extraction removed the coding. Her Tuesday routine went from three or four hours to about thirty minutes, saving 16-plus hours a month. Her own benchmark is the most concrete number in this whole piece: “Recently, I entered 91 bills in 30 minutes. Now I don’t dread my Tuesdays. I don’t even worry about it.”
6. Outsourced FinOps: the same problem across a whole client book
Michael Newberger's firm runs managed accounting for architecture, engineering and construction companies, so his AP problem multiplies by client. Each client brought hundreds of bills, thousands of line items and several layers of approval, all needing project-level cost detail.
He describes outgrowing his previous tool plainly: "BILL is fine if you just need a simple bill pay tool. But when you have high volume and complex needs, it starts to break down. We needed better controls for approvals and payment authorization, and more visibility into all that data." After switching, the work of processing bills fell by a factor of ten with zero manual data entry. Pricing mattered as much as capability for a firm adding approvers constantly: there is no per-user pricing and no cap on transactions, users or entities.
What actually produced the savings
Read the six together and the same four mechanisms show up, regardless of industry or size. None of them is "the software is faster."
- The typing stopped. Every one of them was re-keying data that already existed on a document. Line-item capture is the difference between a bill being read and a bill being retyped.
- The coding stopped being a decision. Cahill, Provignage and Patrice were all making the same coding judgement repeatedly for the same vendors. Rules that persist turn a recurring decision into a one-time one.
- Approvals left the building. Locke was walking paper around for signatures. O.Z. had a founder doing it alone on Sundays. Approvers use MakersHub without training. They approve from email in one click, and see only the bills that are theirs, which is why none of these teams had to run a rollout.
- The second entry disappeared. Two-way sync was named by Provignage and Patrice specifically. A one-way push just relocates the manual work to month-end.
The mechanics behind those four are ordinary to describe and hard to build: matching purchase orders line by line rather than at the header total, routing approvals by job, cost code, entity or amount, and syncing both ways into whichever system that business already runs.
How to read any AP automation case study
Most case study roundups in this category are unreadable as evidence, and it is worth knowing why before you compare ours to anyone else's. Four things separate a result you can act on from a number that is just decoration.
- A named company, not "a leading mid-market manufacturer." Anonymous case studies cannot be checked, and the anonymity is usually doing work.
- The starting point, not just the improvement. "80 percent faster" on an unstated baseline can describe almost anything. Every result on this page is paired with the hours before it.
- Who was doing the work. An hour recovered from a CEO and an hour recovered from a part-time clerk are not the same hour, and the difference changes your business case materially.
- A link to the full story. Every figure here is linked to a story written with that customer and published in full, so you can read the parts a summary leaves out.
Apply those four to whatever else you are reading during an evaluation. They are not a high bar, and it is striking how many published results fail them.
One more thing worth doing: check whether the mechanism is described at all. A result that says "we saved time" without saying what stopped happening tells you nothing about whether it will repeat in your business. The four mechanisms above are what did the work in every one of these six, and they are specific enough that you can test them against your own week before you book anything.
How to build the same case for your own team
Time the current process for one week, honestly. Not the estimate, the actual. Include the parts nobody counts: chasing an approver, fixing a coding error found at month-end, walking a check to someone for signature. Cahill's six days a month and Locke's 10 to 12 hours a week were both larger than the team expected before anyone measured.
Count whose hours they are. The value of an hour recovered from a controller, a CPA or a founder is not the clerk median used above. Three of these six were exactly that situation, which is the single most common reason the business case is understated.
Ask what happens at the next stage of growth. Two of the six named avoiding a hire as the real result, not the hours. O.Z. doubled in size without adding admin headcount. That is a different and larger number than a monthly time saving, and it only appears if you model the year ahead rather than last month.
If you are earlier in the evaluation, our comparison of accounts payable software for construction companies covers the job-costing requirements several of these teams had.
Frequently asked questions
What does a realistic accounts payable automation case study look like?
It names the company, the volume, the hours before and the hours after, and who was doing the work. Percentages without a baseline are not verifiable, and a percentage improvement on an unstated number can mean almost anything. The six results on this page range from 16 to 64 hours saved per month, and the spread is explained by volume and by how much coding detail each business needs, not by how well the software performed.
How much time does AP automation actually save?
Across the six published stories here, between 16 and 64 hours a month, or roughly 10x on processing time for a firm handling many clients. What predicts where a business lands is not company size but how much detail its bills carry. A business coding every line to a job or cost code has more manual work to remove than one paying flat monthly bills, so it recovers more.
What is AP automation worth in dollars?
Multiply the hours by the wage of whoever is actually doing the work. At the Bureau of Labor Statistics median of $23.66 an hour for bookkeeping, accounting and auditing clerks, 64 hours a month is about $18,000 a year and 30 hours a month is about $8,500. Those are floors. When the person entering bills is a controller, a CPA or the owner, which was the case for three of these six, the real figure is higher and the avoided-hire effect is larger still.
Do these results depend on being a large company?
No, and the range here shows it. A solo QuickBooks ProAdvisor saved 16-plus hours a month, and a contractor with 24 employees saved more than 40. Simple AP tools stay easy by staying limited. MakersHub stays easy by automating its own setup, which is why a one-person practice and a multi-entity portfolio can run the same platform without either one carrying the other's complexity.
How long does implementation take?
Short enough that none of these six describes it as a project. Contractors, manufacturers, distributors and multi-location operators get white glove onboarding, training and support included, and accounting firms using MakersHub report getting a client configured in about an hour. The hardest version of that test was Outsourced FinOps, who brought an entire client portfolio across at once and found the platform adapted to each client's volume without a separate setup effort per account.
Will our vendors need to do anything?
No. Vendors never need a MakersHub login, so nothing changes on their side when you switch. In several of these stories vendors noticed only that payment got faster: Provignage moved from three or four days to next day, and PJB Construction moved to same-day subcontractor payments, which in trades work is a relationship advantage rather than an accounting one.
What accounting systems did these companies keep?
All of them kept the system they already had, which is the point. The in-house two-way integrations cover QuickBooks Online and Desktop, NetSuite, Sage Intacct, Xero and Intuit Enterprise Suite, with Smart Data Connect handling anything else by file or API. Cahill, Locke, O.Z., Provignage and Patrice all run QuickBooks, and not one of them migrated their books in order to adopt AP automation. Charly Green at Provignage named the practical test: “With other platforms, syncing data to QuickBooks takes several minutes. MakersHub does it instantly.”
Is the data secure enough for a business handling client funds?
MakersHub is SOC 2 Type II certified, with Positive Pay protection on check payments and encrypted collection of vendor bank details. Bill approval stays separate from payment authorization, which is what Outsourced FinOps meant by needing better controls for approvals and payment authorization when serving other people's clients. MakersHub is transparent about where every bill sits and who is holding it, with a full audit trail on every approval and payment.
Read them in full
Every number on this page comes from a story written with the customer and published in full, including the parts that were difficult. Read all of the MakersHub customer stories, or put a week of your own bills through the platform and generate your own number.
Sources: published MakersHub customer stories for Cahill Construction, Locke Buildings, Provignage, O.Z. Enterprises, Patrice Diana Bookkeeping and Outsourced FinOps; US Bureau of Labor Statistics Occupational Outlook Handbook, bookkeeping, accounting and auditing clerks, median hourly wage as currently published (survey reference period May 2024).