For auto dealerships, every location brings its own vendors, its own approval chains, and its own way of doing things. Accounts payable is usually the first function to feel that pressure. This piece looks at what happens when AP complexity compounds across dozens of sites, and how one auction group with 50-plus locations scaled their business without adding headcount.
AP Challenges in Automotive
Auto auction groups and dealership networks deal with vendor types that most industries never encounter. A single location might have separate workflows for transporters, parts suppliers, reconditioning services, utility providers, locksmiths, and glass vendors. Each of those vendor categories may require different GL coding, different approval routing, and different payment terms. Multiply that across 10, 30, or 50+ locations, and the AP team is managing thousands of unique vendor relationships with no single point of visibility.
America’s Auto Auction (AAA) operates more than 50 auction locations nationwide with over 12,000 active vendors. Their AP team processes roughly 32,000 invoices every month. Before they brought AP automation into their dealership operations, the volume was growing faster than the team could keep up.
“We grew fast, and honestly, I felt like I was drowning before we got Stampli. In the last two years we’ve taken on more auctions without having to increase our headcount. My only regret is that we didn’t do it sooner.”Adriane Lohsl
The Visibility Problem
The first thing that breaks in a multi-location auto dealership AP operation is visibility. Invoices arrive through shared email inboxes at each location. Sometimes multiple invoices are bundled into a single PDF. Someone on the AP team has to extract each one, figure out which location and vendor it belongs to, and manually enter the data into the ERP.
At AAA, the AP manager had no centralized way to see the status of invoices across all 50+ locations. To understand where things stood, she had to:
- Pull data from each location individually
- Download it into Excel
- Build pivot tables manually
- Hope the data was current by the time the analysis was done
That process took hours and still left gaps. There was no way to see in real time who was handling which invoice, how long it had been sitting, or whether it was about to go past due.
“Before Stampli, I really didn’t have visibility. Invoices were coming into shared email inboxes, sometimes multiple invoices in one PDF. We had to extract everything, download it, import it into our ERP, and hope nothing was missed.”Adriane Lohsl
In distributed automotive operations, lack of visibility is not just an inconvenience. It delays vendor payments, strains relationships with critical suppliers like transporters and parts vendors, and makes month-end close a guessing game for finance leadership.
Where Generic AP Tools Fall Short
Most AP tools available to dealerships fall into two categories. DMS-based AP tools (built into platforms like CDK, Dealertrack, or Reynolds and Reynolds) handle basic invoice entry and payment processing, but they were designed to manage dealership operations broadly, not to automate accounts payable deeply. Generic AP automation platforms offer more depth, but they are typically built for companies where every invoice follows the same path: one intake channel, one approval chain, one coding structure.
Neither category works well for auto auctions or multi-location dealership groups, where the reality looks more like this:
- Different vendor types at every location. Transporters, utilities, reconditioning, keys, glass, and parts all require different coding and approval handling.
- Entity-level reporting requirements. Each location is often its own entity with distinct GL structures, cost centers, and financial reporting needs.
- Decentralized spend decisions. Location managers or GMs approve invoices locally, but finance needs centralized oversight and governance.
- Acquisition-driven growth. New locations get added regularly, each bringing its own vendors, invoice patterns, and AP workflows that need to be absorbed without disrupting the existing process.
When AP automation forces all of this into a single rigid workflow, one of two things happens: the team builds workarounds outside the system (spreadsheets, email threads, manual tracking), or invoices sit in a queue because they do not fit the template. Either way, the process breaks down as locations multiply.
Configurable Workflows
The core challenge for AP automation in multi-location auto dealerships is giving each location the flexibility it needs while maintaining centralized control. AAA solved this with Stampli’s configurable workflow architecture.
At AAA, each of the 50+ auction locations has different needs. Stampli accommodates that complexity with:
- Customizable fields per workflow. Fields can be added or removed based on what each location or vendor type requires, without affecting other workflows.
- Flexible approval routing. Approvals can be configured per location, per vendor category, or per dollar threshold. Location-level approvers handle their own invoices while finance maintains oversight across all entities.
- Process changes in a single click. When AAA recently needed to start backdating certain month-end invoices, it was one click to add that step. No IT involvement. No system reconfiguration.
This flexibility is core to Stampli’s design. The platform supports any P2P workflow, from simple to sophisticated, without forcing teams to change how they operate. As Adriane described it, they are not forcing everything into one rigid workflow.
“We currently manage more than 50 auctions, and each one has different needs. Transporters, utilities, keys, and glass all require different handling, and that complexity is just part of our business.”Adriane Lohsl
Centralized Visibility
The other half of the equation is visibility. Flexibility at the location level only works if finance can see everything from one place.
With Stampli, AAA’s AP manager can now see invoice status, ownership, aging, and team productivity across all 50+ locations from a single screen. That shift replaced the hours spent pulling data from each location, downloading it into spreadsheets, and assembling pivot tables. The operational picture is now live rather than assembled after the fact.
This matters for more than just AP management. When invoice data is current and accurate across all dealership or auction locations:
- Month-end close is faster. Invoices are already in the system, sorted and ready to process instead of sitting in emails waiting to be counted. AAA’s team no longer has to calculate expenses manually just to understand what should hit the close.
- Audit prep is immediate. Auditors can get what they need on the spot. Every action, user, and timestamp is documented in a complete, immutable audit trail.
- Controllers and treasury are self-sufficient. AAA’s controllers can run their own reports without training or AP involvement. Treasury uses the system to research bank payments and verify whether invoices are attached.
“Now I can go into one screen and see who’s handling an invoice, how long it’s been sitting, and when it’s due. From a manager perspective, that changed everything. I can see productivity in real time. The numbers don’t lie anymore.”Adriane Lohsl
Scaling Without Adding Headcount
This is where architecture determines whether a growing auto dealership or auction group can scale efficiently. Every time AAA acquires a new auction, the invoice volume, vendor count, and workflow complexity increase. Under the old manual process, that meant the AP team needed to grow proportionally.
With Stampli’s ERP-aligned integration with Microsoft Dynamics 365, each new location’s data flows into the existing structure automatically. Stampli mirrors the ERP’s chart of accounts, entities, dimensions, and vendor master through deep, bi-directional synchronization. When a new entity is added in Dynamics 365, Stampli picks it up. New vendors, new GL codes, new approval chains: they all sync without manual reconfiguration.
The result is that AAA has taken on multiple new auctions over the past two years without increasing their AP headcount. The platform absorbed the growth because it was designed to. Your ERP is the single source of truth. Stampli acts as the system of engagement that extends it. When those two systems share the same structure natively, adding a new location is just additional data flowing through the same automated process.
AI-Powered Invoice Processing
At 32,000 invoices per month across 12,000+ vendors, the manual coding and data entry workload is enormous. And in a multi-location operation, the problem is not just speed. It is accuracy: making sure every invoice hits the right GL code, the right entity, and the right approval chain without someone hand-checking every line.
Stampli’s AI is built directly into the invoice workflow to handle that work. It learns each location’s coding patterns, evaluates invoices against live ERP data, and keeps the process moving without adding manual steps for the AP team. At AAA, that looks like this:
- Vendor identification. Selecting the correct vendor name from 12,000+ options on each invoice.
- GL coding. Predicting the right GL code, entity, and dimensional coding based on historical patterns and live ERP data.
- Data extraction. Pulling invoice dates, descriptions, and line items automatically.
- Pre-validation. Checking invoice data against ERP rules before posting so errors are caught before they reach the ledger.
For recurring invoices that are always tied to the same company or GL code, the coding is set upfront through Stampli’s Trays feature. Invoices arrive in the queue already coded, and AP specialists can process one in under a minute.
“You might think one click doesn’t matter, but when you’re doing that a thousand times a day, it does.”Adriane Lohsl
Why This Matters for Growing Automotive Operations
The challenges AAA faced are not unique to auto auctions. Multi-location dealership groups, fleet management companies, and any distributed automotive operation with 10 or more locations face the same pressure: vendor sprawl, decentralized spend, location-level complexity, and the need to scale without proportionally growing the back office.
The pattern is consistent. Manual AP processes create a linear dependency between invoice volume and headcount. Every new location means more people doing the same manual work. AP automation that is ERP-aligned by design, flexible enough to handle different workflows per location, and intelligent enough to code invoices at scale breaks that dependency. The team stays the same size. The process absorbs the growth. And finance leadership gets the visibility and control they need across every location without chasing spreadsheets.
