Automate Accounts Payable and Quantify Your Savings

Most small businesses use QuickBooks Online or Xero, sometimes with add-ons like Bill.com or Melio. These tools offer basic invoice scanning, but their optical character recognition (OCR) often fails on non-standard formats, forcing manual correction. Their rule-based systems for assigning general ledger (GL) codes are brittle and cannot handle logic like assigning costs to specific projects or departments without human intervention.

For example, consider a 15-person construction firm. A project manager must approve a subcontractor's invoice against a specific job code before the bookkeeper can pay it. The invoice arrives as a grainy PDF scan via email. The bookkeeper manually confirms the line items with the project manager, who is often on a job site and slow to respond. The bookkeeper then keys the approved invoice into QuickBooks, hoping the job code is entered correctly. This process takes 20 minutes per invoice and an error can misstate project profitability for weeks.

The structural problem is that off-the-shelf AP tools are built for a generic, standardized workflow. Their data models are fixed. You cannot add a custom approval step that routes an invoice based on its total amount or link it to a specific field in your project management software. These products must serve thousands of customers with one codebase, so they cannot accommodate the unique operational workflows that define how a specific business runs.

The first step is a complete audit of your current AP process. Syntora maps every step from how an invoice is received to how it is paid and reconciled. We would collect 50-100 sample invoices from your most frequent vendors to analyze their formats and identify all required data fields. This audit produces a clear data extraction plan and a defined set of business rules for coding and approvals.

Syntora’s technical approach for this would use a Python service running on AWS Lambda, triggered whenever a new invoice is received via email or uploaded. An LLM, via the Claude API, extracts structured data from any PDF or image, far outperforming traditional OCR. A Supabase PostgreSQL database would store vendor-specific rules, GL codes, and approval histories. Syntora’s internal accounting system uses a similar PostgreSQL ledger, which we built to automate transaction categorization from our Plaid and Stripe feeds.

The delivered system is a private API that pushes approved and coded bills directly into your existing accounting software. Your team would use a simple web interface, deployed on Vercel, to handle exceptions or manage approvals. The entire process from invoice receipt to it appearing in your books would take under 60 seconds. You receive the full source code, deployment scripts, and a runbook for ongoing maintenance.