When I started my role as the second Customer Success Manager at an Accounts Payable automation platform, I inherited a red customer with my book of business.
In the first conversation, they told me our platform had consistently performed poorly, resulting in little more than fragile records and costly delays. They no longer trusted it and had no reason to trust me, either.
The platform ran exactly as built. The damage was due to straight-through automation being switched on everywhere, so the team had to check its work across the AP platform, Workday, and on a separate tracking spreadsheet.
They were too frustrated to troubleshoot what was going wrong, and we didn’t have the logs to retrace their steps. So we arranged a shadowing call and watched them work.
We restored a final human-approval checkpoint before anything posted, and rebuilt the trust that moved the account from critical to stable.
The Account I Inherited
I joined an Accounts Payable (AP) Automation company as the second CSM, but my manager had come on as the first. Now, we were distributing the book between us.
One of my new customers came to me bright red: a customer in critical health claiming almost no value from the platform.
The customer was an AP team for a major sports franchise, the group responsible for paying incoming invoices. They were processing significant volume and using our Optical Character Recognition (OCR) product to extract as many fields as possible.
However, fields that were blatantly incorrect were making it all the way downstream before being caught, resulting in costly delays to important payments.
The AP team’s Manager is who really felt the heat.
Their invoices backed up, their team took the blame for the delay, and they pointed at our platform and our people as the cause.
Every complaint had merit:
- The platform misread invoices. It captured the vendor or amount incorrectly, which flows straight into a payment for the misread figure in Workday.
- The mistakes became someone else's problem. A bad payment surfaces downstream, and the AP team that let it through wears the blame.
- They were stuck on an old version. The features they needed sat behind an upgrade, and running that upgrade meant trusting us not to break their system. We'd given them reason to doubt we could.
The customer was too frustrated to walk us through it and too wary of us to try. They’d been burned too many times.
My manager wanted to help get this relationship in the best possible condition before handing it over to me fully, but we realized something: to see the problem, we had to watch the work ourselves.
What the Platform Was Built to Do
The AP automation platform takes in an invoice and reads its values using OCR.
There are values like:
- header values: the vendor details, taxes, and total
- purchase order (PO) number
- individual line items
In theory, it reads each required value, then passes clean data to Workday, the finance system where the payment is made.
However, if the data arrives in Workday and isn’t clean, there’s a risk the vendor may receive an incorrect payment.
Straight-Through Processing, and the Target It Became
The AP platform has a setting called Straight-Through Processing (STP).
When enabled, if every invoice field meets a specified confidence threshold, the invoice and all its values are posted to Workday automatically.
It sounds like a dream in theory. Our leadership team thought so, marketing the brand with promises that invoices would be 99% touchless.
However, STP meant that the AP team couldn’t verify the values.
- OCR attempts to read the invoice and provides the resulting values.
- Every invoice lands in the Working Queue, regardless of how well the OCR performed.
- AP Team Member reviews the guesses and makes corrections where needed.
- AP Team Member pushes the invoice into Workday.
- OCR attempts to read the invoice and provides the resulting values.
- If all required values exceed the confidence threshold, the invoice goes directly into Workday.
- No AP Team Member reviews the invoice or the values.
If a vendor used a non-standard font and OCR reads “B” as “13”, that’s a problem that could go undetected when STP is enabled.
When OCR makes unchecked mistakes, it moves those confidently wrong values onto the next team, hoping someone else will catch them.
The Work We Observed
The customer wouldn't walk us through the pain points, and we didn't have visibility into their full process. So we went to where the work was happening and watched as they processed invoices for a 2-hour block, one invoice at a time.
We didn’t attempt to correct the process or offer suggestions, but we did ask a LOT of questions.
That is a Gemba walk: a lean-manufacturing habit of trusting the work over the report about it.
There were major problems in both the platform configuration and their workflow. Suddenly, every claim they told us had the weight that it needed.
STP was enabled, and invoices flowed straight through to Workday.
The candidates for touchless processing almost never had 100% of fields correct, even when they all passed the confidence threshold.
No one could tell a good result from a bad one without opening the invoice and checking it against the source.
The team had built their own safety net:
- They opened every invoice
- They validated each field in Workday themselves
- They logged it on a tracking spreadsheet they ran on the side
That spreadsheet, not the platform, was the record they believed.
After the invoice was processed by OCR, anything that didn’t land in the queue for manual processing was reviewed by the team in Workday and marked off in the tracking spreadsheet.
The platform existed to centralize and automate invoice processing, but the team was working out of three interfaces to trust the results.
They recognized that having a human review every invoice after OCR processing stopped the errors. The team was doing the same operations themselves, but outside the platform.
The Plan We Signed Together
The fix ran directly counter to leadership’s drive for touchless invoices, but as CSMs, we were on the ground seeing the harm it was causing.
Disabling STP took a simple configuration flip in two minutes, but rebuilding any trust or rapport with this team took months.
After the exercise, the AP Manager joined forces with us to develop a collaborative plan.
From our side:
- Updated Platform Configuration. We outlined changes to better align the platform with their use case. This included many dial changes, and notably:
- STP Disabled
- Priority working queue placement for their most important vendors
- Full platform training session once the configuration changes were enabled so new and existing team members had training materials ready
From the customer’s side:
- Process Changes on the AP Team. The AP Manager outlined what her team would commit to changing day-to-day. This included:
- Working re-centered inside the AP Platform (now that STP wasn’t an issue)
Together:
- Commitment to Upgrade. Agreed-upon criteria necessary to be met for the upgrade to be scheduled
It was not a fast process. Even with STP off, the team had been so trained to mistrust the results that they needed to see the new flow hold, invoice after invoice, before they believed it.
The account's health turned first to yellow. After the upgrade, we bumped them to green.
The whole process took months, not weeks.
Impact
Trust moved back into the platform
The team verified and signed off in one place, and stopped rebuilding that check in a spreadsheet.
The double work ended
One verified record replaced a pass through the AP platform, a manual re-entry into Workday, and a line in a tracking spreadsheet.
Errors got caught before a payment went out
The review happened before an invoice was posted, so mistakes stopped surfacing after the money had already moved.
The account recovered
It moved from critical risk to stable health, and the relationship steadied with it.
A win the AP Manager could own
She brought her leadership a plan she'd co-authored and results she'd driven. They were moving faster with fewer mistakes. The automation platform could actually automate.
Takeaways
Automate responsibly
The repeatable, low-stakes steps are where automation belongs. If a misread value has major potential for harm, it’s not the right place.
Removing human review is a hazard, not a feature
Automatically posting to a finance system without a plan for exception handling should never be enabled by default or used as a metric for successful automation.
Where It Led
Years later, I went to work at a document-processing platform built the opposite way, one where a person checking the machine's output wasn't a fallback bolted on after a crisis, but by design.
I don't think landing there was a coincidence.
This was the job where I saw up close that unchecked automation isn’t faster; it just moves the work somewhere no one is looking.