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AboutRead In 4 Minutes
Automating AP in Construction Finance
Construction and capital project teams face relentless pressure to deliver on time and on budget—yet one of the most stubborn bottlenecks in their financial workflows remains surprisingly analog: accounts payable.
Manual matching of vendor invoices is a very labor-intensive activity that creates bottlenecks and burdens the finance department with unnecessary costs. It also results in slow approval cycles, and inconsistent data, creating a costly lag between when costs are incurred and when they appear in project controls systems. That delay erodes forecasting accuracy, distorts job costing, and undermines earned value management (EVM).
4castplus has partnered with Contexture to close that gap—bringing AI-powered AP automation directly into the construction project lifecycle.
Connecting AI to AP Automation
The 4castplus–Contexture integration provides AI-driven AP automation through the auto-matching of vendor invoices. It eliminates the highly manual effort of matching a vendor invoice to the receipts (or commitments) that were recorded against a 4castplus purchase order. While 4castplus handles the full procurement lifecycle – from requisition to commitment to receipt to invoice approval – Contexture leverages OCR and AI to extract vendor invoice data, making it available to be auto-matched. The result: significant cost and time reductions when processing large numbers of vendor invoices.
How It Works
Vendor invoices arrive via email, FTP, or cloud storage. Contexture’s construction-trained OCR and AI to extract vendor details, line items, dates, and amounts. That information is stored in a database which 4castplus reads and automatically matches against purchase orders and receiving documents – contained within 4castplus – using 2-way and 3-way matching. Exception cases go through human review before custom approval workflows in 4castplus route invoices by project, department, or cost threshold. Once validated, data flows into the associated 4castplus project for real-time job costing, forecasting, and reporting.
The 4castplus-Contexture automates this in the following four steps:
- Vendors are instructed to send their invoices via a predetermined email address
- The Contexture application will open the email and the attached vendor invoice file (PDF)
- Contexture will use its AI and OCR technology to extract the information in the invoice, and store that information in a database
- 4castplus opens the invoice record in the database and attempts to attest the data contained in the invoice record against the corresponding receipt or commitment data already in 4castplus. To perform the attestation, 4castplus will use a variety of data and filters to locate the corresponding receipts, such as:
- Date
- PO number
- Vendor name and code
- Item ID
- Once the match is made, 4castplus automatically routes the matched invoice for approval.
- Any errors are sent to an “Error Queue” for manual oversight. Notifications are sent.
- Users are provided a transaction log
What 4castplus Customers Gain
AP Automation
Vendor invoice matching is a process that is ripe for automation. It simply asks the question, “Does this invoice match the receipts?” This reduces cost, time and effort to process hundreds of vendor invoices per week.
Accurate, real-time job costing
Line-item invoice data flows directly into 4castplus, sharpening the precision of cost tracking, forecasting, and EVM reporting.
No more manual entry
Teams stop manually keying-in invoices and reconciling costs by hand—reducing administrative overhead and eliminating data entry errors.
Stronger financial controls
Automated 3-way matching ensures every invoice aligns with purchase orders and receiving documents before payment approval.
Fraud and overpayment protection
Vendor validation, duplicate detection, and exception rules prevent costly errors before they reach the books.
Higher Throughput at a Lower Cost
With AP Automation, companies can process thousands of vendor invoices with minimum staff and a fraction of the cost. Configurable routing reduces approval bottlenecks and improves cash flow visibility across projects.
Learn More
Let us know if you’d like to learn more about AP Automation or anything else in 4castplus. We’re happy to help.
