The end of the month shouldn't mean the end of your sanity. Yet for many finance teams, the month-end close is a frantic race against the clock — a stressful cycle of chasing down invoices, manually coding transactions, and hunting for discrepancies buried in spreadsheets. It’s a process defined by late nights, repetitive tasks, and the constant risk of human error.

But what if the entire ordeal could be streamlined?

The secret to a faster, more accurate month-end close doesn’t lie in working harder; it lies in fixing the process at its source: procurement. By implementing two powerful automations — auto GL coding and three-way matching — businesses can transform their closing process from a manual marathon into an automated sprint.

This article breaks down how these technologies work, why they are critical for scaling companies, and how a unified platform like Order.co makes them seamless.

Download the free tool: Invoice Tracking Template

What is the month-end close process?

The month-end close is the series of steps an accounting team takes to verify and adjust account balances to produce accurate financial statements, such as the income statement and balance sheet. This process is essential for financial reporting, strategic planning, and maintaining compliance.

For most businesses, however, it’s a bottleneck. The core reason is a reliance on manual, disconnected workflows. When your purchasing process is decentralized, the data flowing into accounting is messy. Your team is forced to spend the first week of every month cleaning it up by:

• Manually entering invoice data from hundreds of different vendors.
• Chasing down purchase approvals and delivery confirmations.
• Assigning General Ledger (GL) codes to every single line item.
• Reconciling purchase orders, receipts, and invoices to find and fix discrepancies.
• Correcting human errors from incorrect data entry or miscategorization.

This reactive, manual approach is not scalable. As your company grows, transaction volume increases, and the manual close becomes exponentially slower and more error-prone.

Tool

Invoice Tracking Template

Download the invoice tracking template to avoid costly mistakes, clarify financial patterns, and track spending throughout the year.

Download the tool

How automated GL coding accelerates financial reporting

Automated GL coding uses pre-defined rules to assign the correct General Ledger codes to transactions at the point of purchase, eliminating manual data entry and ensuring financial data is consistently and accurately categorized.

What is GL coding?

General Ledger (GL) coding is the process of categorizing every business transaction by assigning it to a specific account in the chart of accounts. For example, a purchase for new office chairs might be coded to "Office Furniture & Equipment," while a software subscription is coded to "Software & IT Expenses."

This coding is the backbone of financial reporting. It allows you to track spending by department, location, or project, create accurate budgets, and generate meaningful financial statements.

Manually, this is a tedious and high-stakes task. A controller or staff accountant has to review every invoice and line item, decide on the appropriate code, and key it into the accounting system. This process is not only time-consuming but also a major source of financial reporting errors. Inconsistent coding can skew budgets and lead to flawed strategic decisions.

The impact of automated GL coding on month-end close

Automated GL coding procurement systems transform this process by applying codes as soon as a purchase is made, not weeks later when an invoice arrives. This shifts the finance team's role from manual data entry to strategic oversight.

Here’s how it directly speeds up your close:

• Drastically reduced manual work. The most immediate impact of auto GL coding on month-end close is the elimination of manual categorization. Instead of your team spending days coding hundreds or thousands of transactions, the system does it instantly. This frees up your finance experts to focus on analysis, forecasting, and strategy.
• Improved accuracy and consistency. Automation operates on rules, not guesswork. By setting up rules based on vendor, item type, department, or location, you ensure every transaction is coded correctly and consistently every time. This creates clean, reliable data that you can trust for reporting and decision-making.
• Real-time financial visibility. When GL codes are applied at the point of requisition, you no longer have to wait until the end of the month to understand where your money is going. Leaders can access real-time, categorized spend data, enabling them to make proactive budget adjustments and prevent overspending before it happens.

With a platform like Order.co, you can create custom GL coding rules that map directly to your chart of accounts in NetSuite, QuickBooks, Sage Intacct, or another ERP. When an employee places an order through the platform, the correct codes are automatically applied, creating a clean, sync-ready transaction from the very start.

How three-way matching reduces reconciliation time

Three-way matching automatically compares three key documents — the purchase order, the goods receipt, and the vendor invoice — to verify a transaction before payment is issued. This automation flags discrepancies instantly and approves valid invoices for payment without manual intervention.

What is three-way matching?

Three-way matching is a fundamental accounts payable control designed to prevent incorrect and fraudulent payments. It validates that you are only paying for what you ordered, what you actually received, and what you were billed for.

The three documents involved are:

1. Purchase Order (PO): The official document confirming the items, quantities, and agreed-upon prices for a purchase.
2. Goods Receipt Note (GRN): An internal document confirming that the items were received in the correct quantity and condition.
3. Vendor Invoice: The bill from the supplier requesting payment for the goods or services delivered.

Manually, this is a nightmare. An AP clerk has to physically or digitally pull all three documents, compare them line by line, and investigate any mismatches in price, quantity, or item description. This process can stall for days or weeks while the team tracks down the purchasing manager or receiving department for clarification.

The benefits of automating three-way matching

Automating this process is a game-changer for AP teams and is the key to how three-way matching reduces reconciliation time.

• Elimination of manual verification. An automated system does the line-by-line comparison in seconds. Matched invoices are moved directly into the payment queue, while only the exceptions — invoices with discrepancies — are flagged for human review. This "management by exception" approach allows your team to focus their attention where it's truly needed.
• Faster invoice processing and payments. By removing the manual reconciliation bottleneck, you can approve and pay invoices significantly faster. This not only improves operational efficiency but also strengthens vendor relationships and allows you to capture early payment discounts, turning AP from a cost center into a value driver.
• Enhanced fraud detection and spend control. The system instantly catches common issues like duplicate invoices, price hikes that violate the PO, or bills for items that were never received. This provides a powerful, automated layer of security that protects your company’s cash flow and prevents budget leakage.

Order.co unifies the entire workflow in a single platform, making three-way matching an inherent part of the process. The purchase is made within Order.co (creating the PO), delivery is tracked (the receipt), and invoices are managed through our Consolidated Billing feature. The system has all three data points in one place, enabling it to perform the match automatically and present your team with a fully reconciled, pre-coded monthly statement.

Tool

Invoice Tracking Template

Download the invoice tracking template to avoid costly mistakes, clarify financial patterns, and track spending throughout the year.

Download

"*" indicates required fields

Email

This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.

First Name*

Last Name*

Company*

Email*

Phone

Beyond AP: why unified procure-to-pay automation matters

While standalone AP automation delivers significant efficiencies, the most forward-thinking finance leaders recognize that accounts payable is just one piece of a larger puzzle. True financial transformation comes from unifying AP with purchasing in a single, end-to-end procure-to-pay (P2P) platform. This approach addresses the root cause of most AP headaches: the purchase itself.

Solve invoice problems before they start

A unified P2P system solves invoice problems by controlling spend at its origin. With a platform like Order.co, all purchases are made through a guided marketplace with pre-approved vendors, products, and pricing. Budgets and approval workflows are built directly into the purchasing process, ensuring every order is compliant from the start. This proactive approach means that by the time an invoice is generated, all the information—price, quantity, GL code—is already correct and approved, making the AP process a simple matter of automated payment.

Consolidate vendors and streamline payments

Managing payments to hundreds of different vendors creates a massive administrative burden. A unified P2P platform with Consolidated Billing transforms this process. Order.co pays your vendors directly and then sends you a single, reconciled invoice for all purchases made across the platform during a given period. Your AP team goes from managing hundreds of invoices and payments to just one, drastically reducing their workload and simplifying cash flow management.

Unlock strategic insights with unified data

When purchasing and payment data live in a single system, you gain a holistic view of your organization’s spend. This unified data is a goldmine for strategic insights. You can analyze spending patterns across departments, locations, and vendors to identify new savings opportunities. This visibility strengthens your negotiating position with suppliers and empowers a more effective strategic sourcing function, turning your procurement process into a driver of value.

Eliminate invoice overload with Order.co

Order.co eliminates invoice overload by replacing traditional, reactive AP processes with a proactive, unified purchasing and payments platform that prevents invoice discrepancies from ever occurring. By managing the entire procurement process from requisition to reconciliation in one place, we make manual invoice work obsolete.

With Order.co, you can:

• Automate the entire purchase-to-pay process, freeing your team from manual data entry and approvals.
• Eliminate three-way matching by ensuring all order data is correct and approved before the purchase is made.
• Receive one consolidated invoice for all your purchases, simplifying payments and reconciliation.
• Gain complete, real-time visibility into your spending to make smarter financial decisions.

Ready to bring order to your AP process and unlock a new level of financial control? Schedule a demo of Order.co today.