Go through their project list and it’s mostly schools. Slate roof replacements at Hunters Hill Public School and North Sydney Girls High. A music and performance space at Narrabeen Sports High, a facade upgrade at Balgowlah Boys, concrete and ramps at Penrith South. There’s a food technology upgrade at Muirfield High and a science lab fitout somewhere most months, along with heritage work, ground works and the occasional job for Fire & Rescue.
That project diversity is what makes the invoices difficult. Multiple jobs going at once, each with its own subbies, purchase orders and variations turning up along the way. As well as product and hardware from the likes of Bunnings and Reece. Overall it becomes four to five hundred supplier invoices coming in every month across the lot of it.
Matt’s a director and until recently every one of those invoices went past him on paper.
The pile
The bookkeeper printed every invoice that came in.
They went into a stack on Matt’s desk. He’d work through the pile by hand and tick off what could be paid. Then the bookkeeper keyed them into MYOB one at a time and files lived in Dropbox.
An invoice got approved by Matt putting a digital stamp on it. Getting him to that point meant walking across the office, a phone call or a text. Really Matt was the approval process.
By the 10th of the month we’d be pushing bills through and feeling like we were underwater with the paperwork, with no real visibility of what was going out. Now by the 10th we know exactly what went out last month and we can forecast what’s coming this month.
Suppliers were still paid on time. But the team was collectively spending hours every week on it, and most of it landed on Matt. He was staying up late to make sure the payments were correct.
What the paper was hiding
Two things went wrong often enough to matter.
Invoices came in coded to the wrong account. And the numbers didn’t always tie back to the purchase order. A subbie bills for more than was ordered, or the lines don’t match, or there’s a variance he had to chase.
Matt caught them. He was checking hundreds of invoices a month against paperwork spread over spreadsheets, printouts and conversations.
The bookkeeper reconciled invoice lines back to POs by hand. It took AGES.
It didn’t matter if Matt was on site or away. He was still having to process the invoices.
If money’s gone, it’s gone. Nobody wants to ask their suppliers for money back because they overpaid.
The one that nearly got through
A couple of years ago, before Pulsify, someone spoofed Matt’s email address and sent through a $20,000 invoice. Nobody would have guessed Matt was being spoofed. It looked very real and it was added to the pay run.
But Matt knew he hadn’t sent that email. He was on a flight at the time. Luckily it didn’t get through, because Matt reads everything going out during the pay run and he picked it up.
He knew it was time for a better system.
Getting it running
There was never a shortlist. NACS hadn’t used anything before Pulsify so there was nothing to move off and nothing to compare it against. The old system was paper.
Connecting MYOB AccountRight took minutes. One click and Pulsify had the supplier list and the chart of accounts.
The bookkeeper had the harder adjustment. It was a new way of working and the first stretch meant learning where things lived instead of doing what they’d done for years. That didn’t last long. After a few runs it was faster than printing and keying.
What happens now
Invoices go to a Pulsify inbox instead of a paper stack or a digital stamp. They come back coded, with the GL account and GST filled in and matched against the purchase order line by line. Progress invoices are matched against the PO in real time, so they know exactly how much they’ve been billed.
Variances get flagged. So do changed supplier bank details, ABNs that don’t check out and potential duplicates.
Pulsify doesn’t block anything. It flags the invoices worth a second look before they enter MYOB. They still go through a multi-step approval workflow and Matt still makes the final call on every one.
The spoofed invoice is the kind of thing that comes up now before anyone gets near a pay run. Pulsify checks the supplier name and the bank details on every invoice against what’s already on file and anything that doesn’t line up gets raised before it reaches the approval stage.
Nothing gets printed. The bookkeeper isn’t rekeying into MYOB and Matt isn’t the bottleneck between an invoice arriving and it being paid.
Month-end used to take about ten days. It now takes five.
The complicated ones
A single invoice covering several jobs used to be the worst kind. Different account codes on different lines, each one reconciled back to a PO and any variance chased down before it could go anywhere.
That ran on spreadsheets, paper and a lot of conversations. Now the lines get split in the same place everything else happens and everyone’s working off the same record.
Would he recommend it
Matt says he feels like Pulsify is purpose-built for SMBs and highly recommends it to other builders. He has put his other construction businesses on it as well, and across the organisation they now run close to 1,000 bills a month.
Running AP the same way?
Pulsify takes an invoice from your inbox to a coded, approved-ready bill in MYOB or Xero, without the rekeying. Takes minutes to set up.
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