Cedarbrook cut vendor follow-up from a full-time job to twenty minutes a day.
Cedarbrook ran close to 400 active subcontractors and suppliers through one AP coordinator, who spent most of most weeks chasing W-9s, missing documentation, and the same three payment-status questions. The goal wasn't a faster inbox, it was getting that time back for actual account work.
Vendor AgentThe bottleneck
One AP coordinator owned vendor communication for the whole company, and by her own count spent 25 to 30 hours a week on email that was the same handful of requests reworded for a different vendor.
Year-end W-9 collection was still open into February most years, because reminders went out whenever she found time, not on any fixed schedule.
Collections and payment-status follow-up had no consistent cadence, so some vendors got chased weekly out of habit while others went quiet for months without anyone noticing.
The workflow
We deployed the Vendor Agent against Cedarbrook's vendor master to monitor for missing W-9s and documentation, sending requests automatically and following up on an escalating schedule instead of whenever there was time.
Payment status questions now get answered by pulling the real status, amount, date, method, from the ERP and generating a specific reply, instead of the coordinator manually looking each one up.
Collections outreach follows the same defined cadence for every account, and only escalates to the coordinator when a balance crosses a set threshold or a vendor actually disputes something.
“I used to know I was behind on vendor email because my inbox told me. Now I find out because I still get an occasional ping, and it's always the one that actually needed me.”
AP Coordinator, Cedarbrook Facility Group
Lessons learned
Find the job inside the job
Cedarbrook's coordinator wasn't struggling with judgment calls, she was buried in a second job's worth of repetitive email layered on top of her actual role. That pattern, one person quietly doing full-time follow-up alongside everything else, is usually the fastest payback in the building.
A defined cadence beats a well-intentioned one
Before this, follow-up timing depended on memory and whichever vendor happened to email back first. Codifying a single escalation schedule made coverage consistent across all 400 vendors instead of concentrated on whoever was loudest.
Automating a chore builds more trust than automating a decision
Vendor follow-up was universally disliked and low-risk to hand off, which made it an easy first workflow to trust. That trust carried directly into the payment-status and collections pieces that came right after.
A defined threshold turns 400 accounts into a handful
Routing only disputes and over-threshold balances to a human meant the coordinator's actual queue most weeks was three or four accounts, not 400. The agent didn't reduce the vendor count, it reduced the number that ever needed a person.
“W-9 season used to run into February every year without fail. This year it didn't, and nobody had to work a weekend to make that happen.”
Controller, Cedarbrook Facility Group