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Procurement & accounts payable

Sixty suppliers, sixty logins, one reconciliation.

Large suppliers get EDI and get integrated. The long tail, the forty vendors that each bill you twice a month, gets a login and a PDF. That tail is where the hours go.

Scope dozens of portals Cadence weekly to monthly Output invoices, POs, statements
What a person does today

A spreadsheet of credentials and a very long morning

  1. Remember how to get in

    Each supplier has its own portal, its own password policy, its own rotation schedule, and its own idea of what a username is. There is a shared spreadsheet. It is out of date.

  2. Find the invoice

    Navigate to billing, filter by date range, find documents that were posted since the last visit, download each one. Some portals allow bulk export. Most do not.

  3. Get it into the ERP

    Key the header fields across, or run them through a parser that struggles with the one supplier whose PDF is a scan.

  4. Push the other direction

    Acknowledge a PO. Confirm a delivery date. Dispute a line item through a form that only exists in the portal.

  5. Reconcile the statement

    Month-end: pull the statement, match it against what you believe you owe, chase the difference.

What PreLogin runs instead

One session per supplier, then it runs on its own

  • Scheduled invoice pulls: per supplier, on the cadence each one posts.
  • PO acknowledgement and delivery-date confirmation pushed back through the portal form.
  • Statement downloads at month end, without anyone remembering.
  • Parallel across suppliers: sixty portals in the time one person took with three.
  • Fail loudly on a changed layout: a run that finds nothing is an error, not an empty month.

Each supplier is its own session, isolated and independently revocable, so one vendor changing their portal does not touch the other fifty-nine.

Where this one gets interesting

Pushing is harder than pulling

Downloads are forgiving. Writing into a portal (submitting an invoice with attachments, acknowledging a PO) is where runs need assertions. We recommend an explicit assertText on the confirmation the portal shows, so a half-submitted form is a failed run rather than a silent duplicate.

Attachments

Cross-origin frames are readable and clickable, which covers a surprising number of portal widgets. Attaching a file to an input is a separate capability we are still finishing; until it ships, a push-heavy workflow is scoped to what can be done by clicking and typing, and the attachment step is a human hand-off.

The ROI is in the tail, not the head

Do not start with your largest supplier; they probably already have an integration. Start with the twenty vendors that each cost someone forty minutes a month. That is thirteen hours a month of work nobody chose to do.

The honest failure mode

Suppliers rotate portal credentials and force password resets on a schedule you do not control. When that happens the session breaks and needs re-capture. Budget for roughly one re-capture per supplier per quarter; it is minutes, not hours.

Start with five suppliers.

Not your biggest, the five that cost the most minutes per month.

Start a pilot