How Quincy Recycle Connected Procurement and AP in One Workflow

Quincy Recycle helps manufacturers turn industrial waste into valuable raw materials through business-to-business recycling, brokerage services, and equipment solutions. Operating eight recycling facilities across the Midwest, the company also owns Quincy Farm Products, which transforms food byproducts into animal feed.

As the business grew, so did the complexity behind the scenes. More locations, vendors, and purchasing activity meant finance needed processes that could scale without sacrificing visibility or control.

Financial Controller Kelsey Hayes understood that challenge firsthand. After nearly nine years with Quincy, including five years in accounting before stepping into the controller role, she set out to modernize finance operations by replacing disconnected manual workflows with a centralized accounts payable and procurement platform.

When Kelsey became Financial Controller, Quincy Recycle’s procure-to-pay (P2P) process relied on paper invoices, spreadsheets, and email.

Purchase orders (POs) were managed from a shared Excel spreadsheet, requiring employees to manually identify the next available row and associated PO number before making purchases. For maintenance teams working in the field, that often meant writing PO numbers down before leaving for a repair shop or supplier, creating opportunities for duplicate PO numbers and unnecessary confusion.

Additionally, the AP team received more than 1,000 invoices each month by email, printed every invoice, manually stamped and coded it, entered the information into the company’s ERP, RIMAS, and physically filed each document until payment. With every manual handoff came another opportunity for errors, misplaced invoices, or missed approvals. Approval workflows lived almost entirely in email, making it difficult to know where invoices were in the process or whether they had been approved.

The weekly payment process added another layer of manual work. Every Thursday, before vendors could be paid, the AP team manually compared each invoice in the payment batch against its corresponding paper copy to verify coding, approvals, and payment details. Instead of reviewing invoices as they moved through the process, finance performed its final validation on payment day, turning every weekly payment run into a time-consuming process.

Invoice retrieval created yet another challenge. If finance needed to review an invoice months later, the team first had to determine when it had been paid before searching through scanned folders containing hundreds of documents.

As invoice volume and operational complexity continued growing, Kelsey knew the business needed a more connected, scalable approach.

"Everything was much more manual. It took more time, there was more room for error, and because approvals lived in email, it was hard to keep track of where invoices were in the process."

To modernize finance operations, Kelsey led the implementation of Stampli’s Procurement and Accounts Payable solutions for Quincy Recycle and Quincy Farm Products, integrating the platform with RIMAS.

Instead of managing purchasing, invoice processing, approvals, and documentation across spreadsheets, email, and paper files, Quincy Recycle now manages the entire workflow in one connected platform.

Employees create purchase requests directly from their phones, managers approve purchases and invoices from anywhere, and invoices flow directly into Stampli, where they’re captured, coded, routed for approval, and synchronized with RIMAS. Because procurement and AP now operate within the same workflow, POs, approvals, and invoices remain connected from request through payment, giving the AP team the context needed without chasing additional information.

"We have way better visibility over our spend and invoices and how things are getting coded and approved than we ever have before."

The connected workflow also changed how finance prepared for weekly payment runs. Instead of waiting until Thursday to manually verify every invoice before payment, approvals and validations now happen continuously throughout the workflow. By the time an invoice reaches the Authorized stage, finance has already completed its final review, allowing payment day to focus on executing vendor payments instead of reconciling paper invoices.

In addition, rather than changing Quincy Recycle’s processes to fit new software, Kelsey configured Stampli to support the way her team already worked. Kelsey leverages custom fields to identify purchases tied to capital projects – even smaller purchases that contribute to larger equipment investments – giving finance better visibility into capital spending and project reporting. Role-based trays automatically organize invoices for AP staff, fixed asset accountants, and equipment specialists, creating clear ownership while reducing duplicate effort and confusion across the invoice lifecycle.

"The trays make it much easier to divide the work between people. Once an invoice is assigned, everyone knows what they're responsible for."

With procurement, approvals, and invoice processing connected in one platform, Stampli AI further streamlines day-to-day operations by automatically identifying vendors and populating invoice information before review. In an average month, Stampli AI populates more than 20,000 invoice fields across 1,000 invoices, allowing the team to spend less time entering data and more time validating transactions, resolving exceptions, and improving finance processes.

Before Stampli, finance chased approvals through email, searched paper files for invoices, and waited until weekly payment runs to identify issues. Today, Kelsey and her team have real-time visibility into every purchase order, invoice, approval, and coding decision from a single workspace.

Business Outcomes:

"The biggest win for me is that my team really likes it. They're the ones using it every day, and now they have time to focus on improving our processes instead of just processing invoices."

With the foundation now in place, Kelsey continues looking for opportunities to make finance operations even more connected.

She plans to expand Stampli to Quincy Exact Solutions while exploring how Deep Finance can help uncover additional operational insights across the business.

Just as importantly, the time saved through automation has allowed the finance team to focus on broader initiatives beyond invoice processing — from increasing ACH adoption across their vendors and improving payment processes to strengthening financial controls and supporting the company’s continued growth.

For Kelsey, implementing Stampli wasn’t simply about modernizing accounts payable. It was about building a finance operation capable of scaling alongside Quincy Recycle’s business and giving her team more time to focus on work that creates value across the organization.