Lights, Camera, Automation: How Cinespace Studios Streamlined Global AP to Support Rapid Growth

About Cinespace Studios

Cinespace Studios is a global film studio network with major hubs in Chicago, Toronto, and Atlanta. The company supports some of the world’s most recognizable productions, including Stranger Things, The Bear, Black Panther, John Wick, The Handmaid’s Tale, and more.

Founded in 1988, Cinespace has grown from its roots as a family-run studio business into a global production platform. Today, the company operates 109 active stages across 4.3 million square feet of production space. Following a change in ownership and a period of rapid acquisition-led growth, Cinespace needed stronger financial controls and more scalable back-office operations to support its next stage of expansion.

The Challenge:
Cinespace needed a more scalable AP process across multiple entities, approval workflows, and global operations.

For years, Cinespace operated as a family-owned business with separate Chicago and Toronto operations. In 2022, TPG Real Estate acquired Cinespace, and by late 2023 the company had added three new entities. Around the same time, Cinespace also moved to Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central.

The combination of new ownership, rapid growth, added entities, and a new ERP environment created significant pressure on the finance team. Cinespace was managing more than 10,000 invoices a year, but much of the AP process still relied on manual work.

Invoices required hand signatures, approvals were often routed outside the system, and AP staff had to manually key invoice information into Business Central. While Business Central helped the team check for duplicates, it did not solve the broader workflow challenges around approvals, coding, routing, and visibility.

“Sometimes we had to send invoices back to the same manager to approve because the approval never made its way to the AP team,” said Sasha Johnson, Corporate Controller at Cinespace Studios. “There are better things to do than approving the same invoice five times. It would delay when payments process for that vendor and could result in vendor relations issues.”

The approval experience was also time-consuming for approvers. Invoices could arrive through Teams, requiring users to open individual approvals, launch separate Business Central sessions, download documents, compare invoice details, and then return to Teams to approve.

As Cinespace continued expanding, its finance and IT leaders recognized that AP needed to become more centralized, consistent, and scalable. The company needed one solution that could support both purchase orders and invoices, integrate closely with Business Central, accommodate custom fields, and simplify the user experience for AP staff and approvers.

The Solution:
Truvio gave Cinespace a Business Central-native way to automate AP while supporting complex routing, custom fields, and centralized approvals.

Cinespace evaluated several AP automation vendors, including providers recognized in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant. The team brought AP staff into software demos, interviewed approvers, and prioritized solutions that could integrate directly with Business Central without requiring a custom-built integration.

Although some vendors offered purpose-built AP tools with more modern interfaces, Cinespace found that many did not handle purchase orders in the way the business needed. The company wanted to avoid separate systems for procurement and payables and instead create a more seamless procure-to-pay workflow.

“It came down to us choosing between Truvio and a purpose-built AP tool with a much flashier UI,” Wolfe said. “Ultimately, we chose Truvio because of seamlessness with BC and the fact that it had a lot of the benefits of a purpose-built solution.”

After selecting Truvio, Cinespace partnered with Admiral Consulting Group to implement the solution. Admiral had an existing relationship with Cinespace and recommended Truvio based on its experience with AP automation for Business Central.

“Our first recommendation whenever anyone inquires about AP automation is Truvio,” said Ben Lane, Client Success Manager at Admiral Consulting Group. “It consistently delivers excellent demos. They’re always very responsive with a very knowledgeable and experienced team there.”

The implementation required careful alignment across Cinespace, Admiral, and the Truvio team. Cinespace had more than 10,000 invoices per year across multiple entities, complex approval rules, custom Business Central fields, and a need to expose the right pages and tables between the approvals portal and Business Central.

“One standout was rapid customizations to Truvio and the initial portal,” Lane said. “Working closely with Jacob, we determined which pages and tables needed to be exposed and related to in the background. Between our development team and Truvio's team, we defined and developed the right flow of invoices to the approvals portal and to the back end to Business Central.”

Truvio helped Cinespace introduce automated invoice approvals, built-in controls, approval hierarchies, document capture, optical character recognition, and streamlined exception handling. The solution also supported the company’s custom Business Central fields while reducing the need for heavy customization.

In the lead-up to rollout, Johnson and Wolfe led testing with the AP team to identify issues and make sure users were comfortable with the new process.

The Result:
Cinespace centralized AP approvals, reduced duplicate work, improved visibility, and created a scalable foundation for global growth.

With Truvio in place, Cinespace saw immediate improvements across its procure-to-pay process. Invoice approvals became more centralized, AP staff gained a clearer view of workflow status, and approvers could manage invoices from one dashboard instead of moving between Teams, Business Central, and individual document downloads.

For Johnson, the new approval experience was a major improvement.

“For me as an approver, I’m loving it,” Johnson said. “Previously it would come through our Teams account with each individual approval, maybe 10 a day, and I’d have to open each one with a BC session in a browser. I had to open a unique session of BC, download the document, then compare it to BC to make sure it was coded correctly, then go back to Teams to approve it. All told, it would then take 30 minutes to process. Now we have only one dashboard for every company. Putting it in one central location is so transparent for AP.”

The AP team also gained greater consistency in invoice coding and processing. Johnson pointed to property tax invoices in the Chicago office as one example. The location receives more than 50 property tax bills twice a year. After processing only a few invoices, the system learned from the pattern and helped the AP team process the remaining invoices much more efficiently.

“It’s helped her because she doesn’t have to manually code them,” Johnson said. “Now, they all get coded the same way. That’s the feedback I get on how time is saved. It gives time to do other things like projects and has really streamlined the whole AP processing.”

Truvio also helped Cinespace strengthen its control environment. The company already had internal controls in place for fraud prevention, and Truvio supported those existing processes with additional validation, more consistent approval trails, and automated update emails to help expedite approvals.

On the back end, the impact was especially clear. Cinespace reduced repeated approval loops, improved transparency for AP, and gave users more flexibility to forward invoices, add comments, and involve the right people in the approval process.

“It also gives us a lot more flexibility than before with approvals going to one person,” Johnson said. “For invoice approvals in the past there was no way to systematically share them. Now we can tag the invoice with a comment or forward it.”

As Cinespace continues growing globally, Truvio has become an important part of its long-term scalability plans. After purchasing a company in Germany, Cinespace was able to integrate the new subsidiary into a more standardized global AP system. The solution also gives the company a foundation for future AI and machine learning capabilities through potential integrations with Blob storage, Copilot, and Azure AI.

“The more we’ve worked with Truvio and discussed with the Truvio team about their future vision, it’s very reassuring, inspiring, and motivational to see the direction of their continued efforts,” Lane said.

For Wolfe, the biggest impact is the time Cinespace has gained back by reducing manual AP work and giving finance teams more opportunity to analyze data, identify issues, and support the business.

Overall, Truvio helped Cinespace transform AP from a manual, fragmented process into a more centralized, visible, and scalable function inside Business Central. With stronger controls, streamlined approvals, and a global AP foundation in place, Cinespace is better positioned to support continued growth across its studio network.