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Decentralized AP looks manageable until it isn't. See how multi-entity manufacturing businesses are solving the visibility, control, and headcount problems that manual invoice processes create.
Most multi-entity manufacturing businesses don't set out to build a broken AP process. It happens gradually, as the business grows, as new entities are added, as each operation develops its own way of handling invoices, approvals, and vendor relationships.
By the time finance leadership recognizes the problem, decentralized AP has usually been normalized. It's just how things work here. The filing cabinets at each site, the approval emails that get lost, the AP staff who spend half their time chasing invoice status — all of it gets treated as the cost of operating a complex business rather than a solvable problem.
It is a solvable problem. But first it helps to understand what it's actually costing you.
In a single-entity business, AP inefficiency is visible and contained. In a multi-entity operation — particularly in industries like forestry, lumber manufacturing, or industrial production — the same inefficiency multiplies across every legal entity, every site, every approval chain.
The typical pattern looks like this: invoices arrive at multiple physical locations. Each operation has its own process for coding, routing, and approving them. Some go directly to site managers. Others require follow-up between operations, finance, and AP. Finding a specific invoice means calling the relevant location and asking someone to pull a paper copy from a filing cabinet.
Finance doesn't have a real-time view of where any given invoice sits in the approval process, whether it's been coded correctly, or when it will be ready for payment. During peak operational periods — seasonal forestry cycles, high-volume production runs — this lack of visibility makes cash forecasting genuinely difficult.
Meanwhile, AP staff are absorbed in tasks that add no value: re-entering invoice data, tracking down documents, following up on approvals, fielding internal requests for invoice status. As workforce pressures increase across manufacturing, maintaining consistent AP coverage across multiple locations becomes harder to justify and harder to sustain.
The direct costs of manual AP — late payment fees, duplicate payments, overpayments — are at least visible. The harder costs to quantify are structural.
Fraud exposure. Decentralized AP is a fraud risk. High-value invoices flowing through multiple locations and informal workflows create openings for vendor banking fraud and invoice phishing. Without centralized controls and consistent verification steps, it's difficult to catch a compromised vendor banking detail before a payment goes out.
Audit friction. When invoices are stored in physical filing cabinets across multiple sites, audit preparation becomes a project in itself. Retrieving documents, reconstructing approval trails, and demonstrating compliance takes time that finance teams don't have — and creates risk when documentation is incomplete.
Headcount dependency. Manual, decentralized AP scales with people, not process. Each new entity or volume increase requires more hands. When staff turn over, institutional knowledge about how each site handles invoices walks out the door with them. This makes AP one of the most fragile functions in a growing multi-entity business.
Cash forecasting accuracy. If you don't know where invoices are in the approval process, you can't accurately forecast when they'll convert to payments. For businesses with large contractor invoices, seasonal cash demands, and long-term supply contracts, that gap in visibility has real consequences for working capital management.
Sinclar Group Forest Products is a family-owned forestry and lumber manufacturing company based in Prince George, British Columbia, operating six legal entities across forestry, lumber manufacturing, pellet production, and prefabricated home solutions through related company Winton Homes and Cottages.
When Sinclar migrated from Microsoft NAV to Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central, the company used the transition as an opportunity to rethink AP across the entire organization. The process they were replacing was exactly what's described above: paper invoices arriving at multiple sites, decentralized approvals, manual filing, and limited visibility into invoice status.
Rather than replicating that process digitally, Sinclar implemented Truvio AP Automation for Business Central and took a different approach to rollout. Instead of outside consultants defining every workflow upfront, the AP team built the playbooks themselves, interacting directly with the AI and training the system as real invoices came through.
"We got immediate high buy-in from our AP staff because we brought them in," said Grant Fast, Business Improvement Manager at Sinclar. "They're the ones creating the playbooks. They're the ones interacting with the solution. They had control."
The results after implementation:
"Truvio has significantly strengthened our financial management processes and overall control environment," said Miranda Perrin, Controller of Lumber Operations at Sinclar. "We now have standardized approval processes, stronger audit trails, and improved internal controls that support both compliance and fraud prevention. The increased visibility into invoice timing has also enhanced our cash forecasting."
The lesson from Sinclar isn't that AP automation solves everything. It's that decentralized AP in a multi-entity business is a design problem, not an operational inevitability.
The reason most manufacturing businesses end up with fragmented AP processes isn't that finance leaders chose them — it's that the processes grew organically alongside the business, and no one stepped back to redesign them at scale. Each entity developed its own habits. The center lost visibility. Manual workarounds filled the gaps.
Fixing it requires two things: the right technology, and the willingness to involve the people closest to the process in redesigning it. Sinclar's experience is instructive on both counts — the AP team's ownership of the implementation is a significant part of why it worked.
For finance leaders in multi-entity manufacturing businesses still running decentralized AP, the question isn't whether the current process is costing you. It is. The question is whether you've put a number on it yet.
Truvio AP Automation is a native Microsoft Dynamics 365 solution trusted by more than 5,000 organizations globally. To see how it works for multi-entity businesses, request a demo.
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