Keeping vendor payments, utilities, software subscriptions, and licensing fees moving across 71 retail locations is a lot for any finance team. For Advance Financial, a Tennessee-based consumer lending company, it’s the job of two people.
That’s not a staffing gap. It’s the result of a deliberate shift in how the company approaches accounts payable. As location count grows, most finance teams hit the same wall: card transactions, invoices, and approvals start moving through disconnected systems, and visibility drops right when it matters most. Advance Financial’s AP team ran into that wall too, and the way they got past it offers a useful blueprint for any growing, multi-location finance operation.
Why Card Spend Breaks AP First
Card spend is usually the first place multi-location AP starts to strain. A regional manager buys supplies. A location pays a recurring utility bill. A department head puts a software subscription on a card. Multiply that across dozens of sites, and the AP team is suddenly dependent on every cardholder coding transactions correctly, every integration syncing on schedule, and every exception getting caught before it reaches the general ledger.
Before implementing Stampli, Advance Financial’s corporate card transactions moved through three separate systems: a card processor, an expense tool, and NetSuite as the system of record. When something broke in that chain, whether a coding error or a sync failure, the AP team had to step in manually, track down missing information, and clean up reconciliation issues after the fact. That pattern isn’t unique to one company. It’s what happens whenever corporate card spend runs through systems that don’t talk to each other.
The fix isn’t a stricter card policy. It’s removing the handoffs between systems, so invoices, card activity, and approvals live on one connected AP automation platform instead of three disconnected ones.
Reconciling Cards Across Locations
Corporate card reconciliation means matching every card transaction against the general ledger to confirm coding, approval, and posting are accurate. At a single location, that’s manageable. Across dozens of sites, it becomes a volume problem: hundreds of individual transactions, each needing to be matched, coded, and cleared before the books can close with confidence.
The core issue is timing. Transactions often post to the general ledger before the full payment picture is clear, creating outstanding balances that someone has to chase down later. Reconciling transaction by transaction, location by location, doesn’t scale, and it’s exactly where Advance Financial is focused next. With Stampli Card already managing recurring utility payments and department-level spend across all 71 locations, the team is now working to reconcile activity at a summarized card-program level instead of matching every individual transaction against NetSuite. That shift alone could turn hundreds of matching events into a much smaller set of reconciled balances each month.
This is also where a documented accounts payable reconciliation process matters most. Without one, reconciliation gaps tend to surface at the worst possible time: during close, when there’s no time left to investigate them properly.
Make Month-End Close Continuous
For a lot of finance teams, close is when problems get discovered instead of when they get resolved. Missing invoices, unapproved transactions, and uncoded card charges all surface at once, and the team spends the final days of the month reacting instead of reviewing.
Advance Financial’s AP Manager, Elizabeth Wallin, described the same pressure before the team built continuous visibility into its workflow: waiting until month-end to identify missing invoices, outstanding approvals, or uncoded transactions left little room to fix anything before the deadline. Now, the team can monitor invoice approvals, card coding, and open transactions throughout the month instead of discovering issues at close.
“Stampli gives us visibility into what’s outstanding, who’s responsible for taking action, and what we need to do to stay on schedule. Instead of waiting until month-end to identify issues, we can manage them throughout the month.”
Elizabeth Wallin, AP Manager
The result: 8 to 10 hours reclaimed every month across close-related work, not because the team works faster under pressure, but because there’s less to untangle when close arrives.
Scale Invoice Volume Without Hiring
This is the part of the story that tends to get a CFO’s attention. Advance Financial processes more than 1,000 invoices a month, averaging 34 fields per invoice, with a team of two. That’s only possible because the manual work of data entry has largely been removed from the equation. Stampli AI automatically fills roughly 90% of those fields, which shifts the team’s time toward validation, approvals, and exception handling instead of retyping information that’s already sitting in the invoice.
The business case is direct. Elizabeth Wallin has said that at the volume Advance Financial manages today, the team would likely need one or two additional AP hires without this kind of automation in place. Avoiding those hires works out to roughly $100,000 a year in labor cost savings, on top of the time the existing team gets back. For a lean team supporting a company with 500+ employees, that’s the difference between AP scaling in step with the business and AP becoming the reason headcount requests keep showing up in the budget.
This is also the piece of Advance Financial’s story worth reading in full. Read the full Advance Financial case study for the complete breakdown of how the team scaled AP volume without scaling headcount.
Turn AP Data Into Decisions
Once reconciliation and data entry stop consuming most of the team’s time, the next question is what to do with all the transaction data that’s now flowing cleanly through one system. Most finance teams don’t have a good answer, because pulling that analysis together has traditionally meant exporting reports and building it manually, on top of everything else on their plate.
Stampli Deep Finance™ was built for exactly this gap. It analyzes AP and card activity that’s already moving through the platform and surfaces what changed, what matters, and where to follow up, without a separate reporting project. For Advance Financial, that turned a two-day AP analysis process into two hours. Elizabeth Wallin has also used Deep Finance to identify high-spend vendors that could be candidates for early-payment discounts, turning routine transaction data into a working-capital opportunity the team wouldn’t have surfaced manually.
“Having Deep Finance gives us a much clearer view of our performance. It’s not just about tracking numbers, it actually helps us see where we’re doing well and where we have room to improve, which makes our decision-making so much easier.”
Elizabeth Wallin, AP Manager
What Connected AP Makes Possible
Add it up: less time lost to card reconciliation, a close process that doesn’t require a scramble, and invoice volume that no longer forces a hiring decision. What’s left is capacity, and what a finance team does with that capacity is often the more interesting story.
At Advance Financial, that capacity turned into broader responsibility. The AP team has taken on treasury, accounting, and process-improvement work that wouldn’t have fit into their schedule when most of the day was spent on manual reconciliation and data entry. For controllers managing lean teams across multiple locations, that’s the real argument for connected AP: it’s not just about processing invoices faster, it’s about what the team gets to do once processing invoices stops being the whole job.
Read the Advance Financial AP case study to see how Stampli helped the team reclaim time, improve visibility, and scale AP without adding headcount.
