A professional services firm with a two-person finance team had no reliable view of committed expenses. Subscriptions were tracked nowhere, invoices lived in a shared inbox, and month-end close was built on guesswork. We delivered seven purpose-built tools in eight sprint weeks — covering every failure point from intake to reconciliation.
Every business has a system for what comes in. Receivables are tracked, aged, chased, and reported. Invoices go out with due dates attached, automated reminders running, and a live number on the dashboard at any moment. The discipline applied to revenue recognition is not matched on the expense side — and for most non-manufacturing businesses, it never has been.
The inbox is the system. The spreadsheet is the database. Month-end close is where the reckoning happens.
This asymmetry is not a discipline failure. It is a tooling gap. The platforms built to close it — Coupa, SAP Ariba, Tipalti — are priced and configured for organisations with dedicated procurement and IT functions. The mid-market firm running on two finance staff and a QuickBooks subscription has no equivalent infrastructure, and no realistic path to the enterprise stack.
"Accounts payable challenges are rarely about invoices. They are about control — whether liabilities are fully visible, whether approvals are defensible, and whether month-end numbers reflect operational reality."
Payhawk — AP Research, 2026
The scale of the problem across mid-market firms is well-documented:
The expense management problem in a mid-market business is not one failure. It is seven, each amplifying the others. Together, they mean that finance is operating with a permanently distorted picture of the organisation's committed expense base.
These are not independent failures. Each one amplifies the others. Together, they mean that finance is operating with a permanently distorted picture of the organisation's committed expense base — and the month-end close is where that distortion becomes visible, every 30 days.
jig delivered seven purpose-built internal tools over eight consecutive sprint weeks. Each addressed one specific failure point in the operation. Each was scoped, built, and in production within five to seven working days of being agreed — with no configuration work required from the client's finance team.
The tools addressed every failure point in the existing operation. The result was not an incremental improvement — it was a structural change in how the finance team operates.
Full spend visibility from day one. Finance gained a live view of all committed expenses for the first time — subscriptions, outstanding invoices, and pending approvals in one place.
Invoice cycle cut from 10–12 days to 3. Structured routing and automated escalation replaced email reminders and individual follow-up entirely.
Early payment discounts captured automatically. Supplier discount windows are flagged and acted on rather than forfeited — a saving that compounds monthly.
Fraud exposure structurally reduced. Enforced segregation of duties and duplicate detection at intake eliminated the single-person control gap that previously existed across the entire AP process.
Month-end close fully automated. The close now runs from a single continuously updated record. Manual reconciliation across email threads and spreadsheets is eliminated.
The tools in this scenario reflect a professional services context. The problem is not sector-specific. Any business managing supplier invoices through email and subscriptions through a spreadsheet faces the same seven failure points. The sector changes. The pattern does not.