Every accounts payable product built in the last decade optimised the same 4 seconds: the moment a person looks at an invoice and decides it is fine.
Better capture got the invoice in front of them faster. Better rules produced a coding they were more likely to accept. Better inboxes stacked the queue more sensibly. The review was never questioned, only accelerated, because the software was designed on the assumption that a person had to see the bill before it could post.
At Oper Credits, an employee photographs a receipt and sends it to Slack. That used to open a 10 to 15 minute job for someone in finance: split the invoice across line items, code each one, check it against policy. It now takes under a minute, and most of that minute belongs to the agent. "Our employees only have to go to Slack, send a message with a picture of their receipt, and the system does the rest," says Cédric Van Heybeeck, the company's Finance Manager. "There's a lot less chasing from me involved."
to process a multi-line invoice at Oper Credits, submitted by photo in Slack
to process revenue at Famly, per Rasmus Vogt, the company's VP Finance
invoices a month Tillo sends straight from Light over the API, with no review step in the UI
Removing the review is not removing the control
This is the objection worth taking seriously, and it has a mechanical answer.
A bill matches its purchase order by amount. The person who ordered the goods confirms they arrived. Duplicates are caught before approval, not after payment. Vendor contracts are checked, and conditional routing sends the exceptions where they need to go. The control did not disappear. It moved off a human's judgment at the moment of payment and onto the transaction itself, where it applies to every invoice rather than to the ones somebody had time to look at properly.
That is a stronger control, not a weaker one. A person reviewing 400 invoices a month approximates. A match either reconciles or it does not.
The cost of the old way is easy to underestimate because it is spread thin. At Proxify, attaching receipts by hand runs about 2 minutes each, and a receipt that never turns up is VAT the company cannot reclaim. Neither number is dramatic on a single invoice. Both are large by the end of a quarter.
ControlPlane's CFO, Ben Fotheringham, describes the version built for difficulty rather than volume: "It's the only product I've seen that can accurately parse and code our 100+ line invoices from Perk."
What it looks like at the far end
At Tillo, 750 to 900 invoices a month leave Light and go straight to the customer over the API. "We're sending them directly over the API and distributing them directly to the customer," says Arron Jennings, the company's Finance Transformation Manager. "We're not even triaging or reviewing these in the UI anymore. They're just directly happening." Revenue lands in the books on T+1 rather than at the end of a review queue.
"We're not even triaging or reviewing these in the UI anymore. They're just directly happening."
Arron Jennings, Finance Transformation Manager, Tillo
The same thing runs on bills arriving. At Ocean.io, a bill is split into the correct P&L accounts by rule before anyone looks at it. "I really like that I can automatically split a bill into the right P&L accounts from the get-go, that I can just set that up," says Kristoffer, the company's CFO. At Famly, missing receipts are chased by an agent rather than an accountant, and the VP Finance calls Light "the first solution ever that makes non-finance employees excited about invoices and expenses." That last one is a different class of evidence. Nobody dreads expense day.
Peter Egehoved, COO and CFO at Dreamdata, describes what the review step becomes once the coding is trustworthy: "I don't have to look at 100 transactions, I have to look at three." The work does not disappear. It shrinks to the part that was ever worth a person's attention.
Old model
Capture, then review
OCR or a rules engine proposes a coding. A person opens the invoice, checks it against policy and the PO, and approves before it posts.
Light's model
Match, then post
The bill matches its purchase order, goods receipt confirms delivery, coding applies automatically. The control lives in the match.
What changes
The queue stops forming
Oper Credits: under 1 minute per invoice. Tillo: 750 to 900 a month with no review. There is no daily backlog to work through.
Where the work goes
Removing a step from a process is only interesting if something better occupies the time. At Oper Credits the finance manager stopped chasing colleagues. At Famly a 20 hour revenue process became 15 minutes. At Tillo the AP and AR functions run without a triage step, and the finance team spends its attention on the parts of the business that reward attention.
This is the pattern underneath every one of these numbers. Finance teams that stop operating the machinery start building with it. They write the rules the matching runs on, set the thresholds, decide what an exception is, and hand the execution to something that does not get tired at invoice 300.
A team evaluating this category today is choosing between software that makes the review faster and a ledger that removes the reason for it. The first buys incremental speed on the same step indefinitely. The second is already running at Oper Credits, Tillo, Ocean.io and Famly, and it treats invoice review the way a factory treats manual inspection once tolerances are built into the machine. Not faster. Gone.
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