Envelope AI · Wholesale distribution · Modelled example
An electrical distributor gets ten workdays a month back from AP
Electrical supply distributor · 25 staff · 90 active vendors
- 76.6 hrs
- AP hours recovered a month
- 790
- documents handled a month
- $35,229
- net saving a year, after the subscription
- 11.4×
- return on the subscription
The business
A single-branch independent electrical distributor: a busy counter and warehouse, five buyers on company cards, and a long list of suppliers feeding constant restocking. Twenty-five staff and 90 active vendors, so 115 accounts in Envelope.
The monthly load
| Document stream | Per month | Minutes each | Hours |
|---|---|---|---|
| Corporate-card receipts (5 cards × ~30) | 150 | 5 | 12.5 |
| Personal-card expense claims (20 staff × ~5) | 100 | 5 | 8.3 |
| Supplier invoices (90 vendors × ~6, matched to PO and receipt) | 540 | 9 | 81.0 |
| Card-statement reconciliation | 5 | 45 | 3.8 |
| Total by hand | 790 | 105.6 |
The weight is the 540 supplier invoices, most of them multi-line restocking orders that have to be checked line by line against the purchase order and what actually arrived.
A three-way match on every invoice
Envelope reads each supplier invoice, finds its purchase order in Spire, and checks every line against both the order and the quantity received to date, including earlier partial shipments, so split deliveries still match. If a line bills more than was received, or the price is outside tolerance, the invoice waits for a buyer to approve it.
At about $2,400 an invoice, those 540 invoices carry roughly $15.5M of purchasing a year. Catching even 0.5% of it in price and quantity errors before payment would be about $77,760 a year, on top of the labour saving.
Before and after
| Hours a month | |
|---|---|
| By hand: key, code, match, reconcile, file | 105.6 |
| With Envelope: review and approve the exceptions | 29.0 |
| Recovered | 76.6 (73%) |
What it’s worth
| Hours recovered a month | 76.6 |
| Value at $42 an hour | $3,218 / month |
| Envelope subscription ($20 + $2 × 115 accounts, plus HST) | −$282.50 / month |
| Net saving on labour alone | $2,936 / month · $35,229 / year |
What doesn’t show up in hours
- Overbills stop before payment. Every invoice is checked against the live PO when it’s posted.
- Split shipments still match. Received and invoiced quantities are tracked across partial deliveries.
- No double posting. Duplicate invoices from the same vendor are caught.
- Vendors match themselves. Every correction teaches Envelope which Spire vendor a supplier name belongs to.
- Faster month-end. Card statements match themselves to the receipts and invoices already posted.