Eastern Industrial Supplies Scales Smarter and Lifts the Burden on AP

A Growing Business, A Manual Bottleneck

Josh Page has been IT Director at Eastern Industrial Supplies for over 22 years. In that time, sales have grown tremendously–by over 650%. That’s an incredible achievement, but also a reality that puts pressure on every back-office function, including the accounting team.

“The AP team has grown a ton over the last few years,” Josh explained. “It’s not one-to-one with sales growth–it’s exponential. Payables have doubled, tripled, even quadrupled in size.” 

Manual document processing took the team considerable time. “Going through a hundred and twenty line statement was taking an hour and ten minutes,” said Josh. 

Previous solutions the team had tested to automate this manual work had proven incomplete. “We automated some stuff early on, on our own,” said Josh. “We tried an OCR tool. But we ran into issues where it didn't handle something, or an integration didn’t work as intended. Weird things would happen and there was always one more thing to solve for.” 

As administrative burdens grew, team leaders clamored for more help in the form of new hires. When the Head of Accounts Payable left, Josh was able to make an alternative suggestion based on his technical expertise. “I said, ‘We can throw more people at this problem, or we can try AI. Just give me a chance and let's see where this goes.’”

“We can throw more people at this problem, or we can try AI. Just give me a chance and let's see where this goes."

Core Challenges

• Manual AP at scale: Invoices across stock, directs, and expenses required hand entry, with PO variance checks adding extra manual reconciliation steps
• Slow statement reconciliation: Reviewing every line of a vendor statement could take over an hour per document
• A hard ERP to integrate: Eclipse's architecture had defeated previous automation attempts, making proven integration essential
• Inadequate older technologies: Previous automation attempts, including an OCR-based system, didn’t perform to the standards the team required

A Proven Track Record of Implementation Expertise

Eastern Industrial’s sales team had already experienced success automating order entry with Canals and knew the technology could deliver, so moving forward with Canals’ AP automation was a natural choice.

When it came to understanding Eclipse, Canals made it simple for Josh. The ERP's quirks–including how it handles invoice generations, order number matching, and data relationships that don't behave the way other systems do–required no explanation.

“[Canals] understands it. They just get it and it's done. I've never had to explain to them what they actually need from me. That's important."

For the AP implementation specifically, Eastern Industrial needed support with PO variance checks. This time-consuming manual process–pulling payables, doing the math across units and line items, logging the discrepancy–previously took the team hours. Shortly after this pain point came up during implementation conversations, Canals proposed a solution. “Now it’s just automated,” said Josh.

“It’s a great feature that wasn’t even an original selling point. The Canals team just said, ‘We can also do this for you,’ so that was nice.”

Key Benefits

• Under two days to go live using Canals’ pre-built integration with the Eclipse ERP
• Canals proactively built a solution for PO variance checks, a pain point that required manual work to check for discrepancies that could lead to incorrect or overpayments
• PO variance reports are now generated and ingested automatically on an hourly cadence to better track discrepancies between what was ordered versus what should be paid

From Line-by-Line Reconciliation to Exception Management

So far, it’s smooth sailing for Eastern Industrial’s AP team. The AP team has picked up the tool quickly and they’re no longer looking to add headcount.

AP automation now processes thousands of invoices a month automatically. The team has moved from data entry to exception resolution. Directs, which previously carried a meaningful error rate because salespeople sometimes entered incorrect vendor information, are now matched accurately by Canals in nearly every case.

“It's very easy. You're either managing expenses, directs, or stock. It’s all very simple, right there in front of you.”

Statement reconciliation has yielded the clearest benefits. Before Canals, a 120-line statement took roughly an hour and ten minutes to process manually. With Canals, statements like that are only flagged for human review when an exception is detected–typically four or five cases out of a hundred. The rest resolve automatically, in seconds.

With hours back in their work week and relieved from tedious data entry, Josh has seen a noticeable difference among the members of the AP team. “We’ve seen a huge shift,” says Josh. “This is hard to quantify, but so much pressure has been lifted.” That’s the kind of qualitative difference that helps an AP team succeed.

Business Impact

• Additional headcount avoided–the team onboarded Canals AP rather than new staff
• Statement reconciliation shifted from every payable to four or five exceptions out of a hundred, saving the team hours of work per week
• Higher accuracy on directs, with Canals correctly matching vendors in nearly every case, protects against incorrect or overpayments

Support That Keeps Up With a Complex Operation

As was the case with sales order entry automation with Canals, Josh continues to appreciate the support he receives from the Canals team. 

"Support is probably the best part of this, from my point of view," Josh said. "Even the customer-facing side: I tell our users to start with the Canals chat. Issues rarely get to me."

The team’s deep expertise in Eclipse has made it much smoother and easier to ensure Eastern Industrial has what they need to succeed. Single sign-on access, Eclipse-specific data matching, and PO variance automation have all been set up quickly and without hand-holding. 

“There's nothing worse than asking for something and then having to explain to them what they actually need from you. I've never had to do that with Canals.”

Two Teams Now Live on Canals

With sales order entry automation and more recently accounts payable automation, Josh continues to be happy with the value Eastern Industrial gets from Canals. "The technology keeps improving–statements, AP, all of it,” said Josh. “The product is fantastic. There's no user licenses to manage. Anytime they add something, it just gets thrown in. It's very, very nice."

Learn more about how Eastern Industrial is using Canals for Sales Order Entry.