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A production finance team rarely has an accounts payable problem when things are quiet. The problem shows up during peak filming weeks, when supplier invoices, freelance crew invoices, location fees and equipment hire bills all arrive within days of each other, and the same one or two people are responsible for getting every one of them entered, matched and approved before payment terms run out.
This is the gap accounts payable automation is built to close, and it is a topic we have not covered on this blog before. Here is how AP automation actually works within a production finance system, what it takes off a finance team's plate during a high-volume period, and why it matters for avoiding duplicate or late payments specifically.
Within Creative Total Media's Business Central platform, AP automation runs through Continia Document Capture, and it replaces three separate manual steps with one connected process.
Invoice capture. Rather than a finance assistant opening each supplier invoice and typing the supplier name, invoice number, line values and VAT into Business Central by hand, the system uses OCR technology to read that data directly off the document, whether it arrives as a PDF, a scan or an email attachment.
Coding suggestions. Once the invoice data is captured, it is automatically matched against the relevant purchase order, so the correct production, cost code and supplier record are suggested rather than looked up and typed manually. This three-way matching check, invoice against purchase order against goods or services received, happens without anyone keying figures a second time.
Approval routing instead of manual keying. The invoice then moves into a configured approval workflow automatically. It reaches the right approver based on the production or department it belongs to, rather than sitting in an inbox or a physical tray until someone remembers to chase a sign-off.
The result is that a finance assistant is reviewing exceptions and approving matched invoices, not re-typing the same data that already exists on the document itself.
Productions with a high volume of supplier invoices and crew invoices carry a specific kind of administrative load that smaller operations do not face in the same way. Location hire, equipment rental, catering, freelance crew day rates and post-production services can each generate their own invoice stream, often from suppliers used for a single production only.
Manual processing means every one of those invoices is opened, read, keyed into the finance system, matched by eye against a purchase order or contract, and then routed for approval by email or by hand. Each step is a place where an invoice can stall, whether that is a finance assistant working through a backlog, an approver on set and unreachable by email, or a query about which production a cost belongs to.
AP automation removes the data entry step entirely and replaces manual matching with an automatic one. It does not remove the need for a human to review anything genuinely unusual, a price that does not match the purchase order, a supplier that is new to the system, an invoice with no matching PO at all. What it removes is the repetitive, low-value keying that consumes a finance assistant's day during a busy shoot, freeing that time for the exceptions that actually need judgement.
Duplicate and late payments are not rare edge cases in manual AP processing, they are a predictable consequence of volume and speed working against each other. Research from APQC's Open Standards Benchmarking on accounts payable finds that even top-performing organisations still see a measurable share of annual disbursements go out as duplicate or erroneous payments, a figure that rises further for organisations without strong automated controls, according to analysis of that research published by payments platform Corpay. corpay
The mechanics of how a duplicate payment happens are straightforward. The same invoice arrives twice, once by email and once in the post, or is logged under a slightly different reference number by two different people, and without a system checking every new entry against everything already paid, both versions get processed. Three-way matching closes this gap automatically, because an invoice cannot be approved for payment against a purchase order that has already been fully matched and paid.
Late payments follow a similar pattern during high-volume periods. When invoices are queued for manual entry, the ones that get processed first are often whichever happen to reach the top of the pile, not necessarily the ones closest to their due date. Approval routing removes that randomness by moving every invoice into a workflow the moment it is captured, so nothing sits unprocessed simply because a finance assistant has not reached it yet.
The scale of the underlying cost is well documented. Ardent Partners' 2023 research into mid-market accounts payable found that the average cost to manually process a single invoice was $12.98, with an average processing time of 14.4 days, figures reported in Ardent Partners' ongoing AP benchmarking work. On a production processing dozens of invoices a week during peak filming, that processing time is the difference between catching a problem while there is still budget headroom to fix it and finding out after the money has already gone. getyooz
Before. It is week three of principal photography on a returning series. A finance assistant arrives on Monday to a stack of 40 supplier and crew invoices that came in over the weekend: equipment hire, a location fee variation, six freelance crew day-rate invoices, and a catering bill that looks similar to one already paid the previous week, though nobody is quite sure without checking. Each invoice is opened individually, the data typed into Business Central by hand, and then cross-checked manually against a purchase order spreadsheet. Three invoices cannot be matched to a PO at all and are set aside for a call to the production manager, who is on set and does not pick up until the evening. By Wednesday, the assistant is still working through Monday's stack while Tuesday's invoices arrive on top of it. The catering bill turns out to be a genuine duplicate, caught only because the assistant happens to recognise the amount.
After. The same 40 invoices arrive and are captured automatically as they come in, with supplier, amount and VAT read directly from each document. Continia's matching engine checks each one against its purchase order and flags the three that have no PO match, along with the catering invoice, which the system identifies as a likely duplicate before it reaches the approval stage. The remaining invoices route straight to the correct approver by production. The finance assistant spends Monday morning reviewing four genuine exceptions instead of keying 40 invoices from scratch, and the rest of the stack is matched, routed and awaiting sign-off by lunchtime.
If your production finance team is still processing a high volume of supplier and crew invoices by hand, particularly during peak filming weeks, get in touch with Creative Total Media about enabling accounts payable automation within your Just-TV setup on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central.
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