The Challenge

Branch brings high-quality office furniture to individuals and teams at a fraction of traditional furniture dealer costs. Since 2018, the brand has expanded to offer over 600 unique SKUs leading to increased complexity in inventory management. To ensure vendor payments matched the inventory purchase orders to prevent over or underpayments, Branch’s AP/AR Associate, Cathryn Stenning, spent hours each week managing multiple expansive spreadsheets (each containing thousands of rows!) to manually compare invoices and purchase orders. The process was so time-consuming that it often happened post-payment resulting in numerous vendor follow-ups to resolve payment discrepancies.

The Solution

Already familiar with uploading POs via Settle’s Purchase Orders suite, Cathryn turned to Settle’s 2-way matching feature to match invoices with the stored POs in real-time during the routine payment process. This automatically highlighted discrepancies and empowered her to quickly determine if an invoice matched its PO and subsequently could be paid or if further investigation was required. With 2-way matching and auto-itemization, Cathryn is now able to see both the PO and bill and all respective line item details on a single screen. This streamlines the verification and mismatch investigation processes in one step.

I'm able to auto itemize both the PO and the invoice and do the comparison right there on one screen.

The Outcome

With Settle’s automatic PO matching, Cathryn can finally remove all the cumbersome spreadsheets from her process and reclaim her time (3 hours a week) to now focus on the more strategic and analytical aspects of her accounts payable role: “I've been able to lean a lot more into the cash flow management and the financing planning including how much of our credit we want to use here, when do we want those repayments to hit our bank, etc. [Settle] has really gotten me away from the nitty-gritty data processing and more into planning and analysis”.

It changed my process entirely. I don't look at the spreadsheet at all anymore - it all exists within Settle now.