Hire your first digital employee.

Worked example: AP digital employee at upper mid-market scale

Illustrative example based on typical engagements. Actual numbers vary by customer mix, exception rate, and ERP integration depth.

Starting state

A specialty distributor at roughly $200M in annual revenue, processing approximately 3,200 invoices per month across 850 active vendors. AP team of 10: one manager, two senior clerks, seven junior clerks, with overflow handled through a temp pool during the quarter-end close window. Average invoice cycle time from receipt to approved-for-payment: 6.4 business days. Exception rate: roughly 18% of invoices, driven by PO mismatches, missing receivers, and coding disputes. Late payment penalties and missed discount captures running approximately $140K annualized.

What the AP digital employee handles

The AP digital employee operates inside the ERP and document management workflow already in place — no rip-and-replace. It owns the work the clerks were doing on the 70–75% of invoices that follow the standard, three-way-matched path:

• Invoice intake and OCR validation against PO and receiver data

• Vendor and GL coding for known vendor patterns

• Three-way match with automatic clearance on clean matches

• Routing to approver based on existing approval matrix

• Exception flagging to a human clerk when any check fails — with the exception reason and the relevant document snippets attached The AP digital employee does NOT handle:

• Net-new vendor setup (stays with AP manager)

• Disputes and chargebacks (stays with a senior clerk)

• Anything flagged for fraud review (routes to controller)

• Manual journal entries and accrual adjustments (stays with the accounting team)

What changes at scale

After 90 days of operation, with the digital employee handling the standard-path 70–75% of invoice volume:

The two redeployed clerks moved to higher-leverage work: vendor master data hygiene (the upstream cause of most coding exceptions) and AR collections follow-up — the latter alone returning approximately $400K in previously slow-paying receivables in the first quarter post-redeployment.

What didn't change

The ERP stayed where it was. The document management system stayed where it was. The approval matrix and the existing controls posture stayed exactly as the controller had built them — every approval still flows through a human approver, and every payment still gets executed inside the existing AP run. The auditor's narrative on AP controls did not need to be rewritten; the digital employee operates inside the controls, not around them.

What this costs

The AP digital employee fits both Workforce options. As a Build engagement, the agent is built and handed off as a flat-rate engagement from $25K, scaled with workflow complexity. As a Managed engagement, it carries a $2,500 setup per agent plus 20% of the FTE-equivalent capacity automated each month, with a 10% gainshare on measured upside — in the AP example, replacing roughly two clerks plus the discount-capture and penalty-reduction value, with payback typically inside 90 days. Your numbers will vary based on starting cycle time, exception rate, and ERP integration depth — Phase 0 is where we figure out which of those levers actually move at your scale.