A small manufacturer runs $5.1M of supplier invoices through one AP desk

Small manufacturer · 95 active vendors a month · 3 currencies

27 hrs

AP hours recovered a month

~410

foreign-currency invoices converted a year

$10,272

net saving a year, after the subscription

4.1×

return on the subscription

The business

A small manufacturer with a lean office, three purchasing cards and a deep supplier base feeding the production floor. Over a year its Spire ledger shows 2,176 supplier invoices from 283 vendors, about 95 of them active in any given month, worth $5.1M, an average of $2,354 an invoice.

The monthly load

Document stream	Per month	Minutes each	Hours
Supplier invoices (from the ledger, CAD / USD / EUR)	180	9	27.0
Corporate-card receipts (3 cards × ~20)	60	5	5.0
Personal-card expense claims (12 staff × ~3)	36	5	3.0
Card-statement reconciliation	3	45	2.3
Total by hand	276		37.2

Three currencies, one AP desk

Nearly a fifth of the invoices aren’t in Canadian dollars: 353 in US dollars and 61 in euros a year. Each one by hand means looking up a rate and converting before it can be posted. Envelope reads the currency, uses the Bank of Canada rate for the invoice date, and posts to the right currency account, removing both the keystrokes and the typing errors that quietly distort landed cost.

Before and after

	Hours a month
By hand: code, match, convert, key, file	37.2
With Envelope: review and approve	10.2
Recovered	27.0 (72%)

What it’s worth


Value of 27 hours at $42	$1,134 / month
Envelope subscription ($20 + $2 × 113 accounts, plus HST)	−$278 / month
Net saving on labour alone	$856 / month · $10,272 / year

The bigger number is the purchasing it protects. Envelope checks every invoice against its PO and the quantity received before it’s posted. On $5.1M of purchasing, catching just 0.5% in price and quantity errors would be about $25,615 a year, more than the labour saving itself.