the invoice cycle that closes in days, not months.
how a global beauty retailer compressed its quarterly supplier-bonus invoicing from 70-120 days to 15, across nine hubs and 27+ markets - releasing €1.1m in trapped working capital.
a quarter-close that bled into the next quarter.
every quarter, the retailer invoices its largest beauty supplier for substantial bonuses - media spend, promo investment, on-site visibility, shipping reimbursement, tv campaigns, sell-in accruals, new-project budgets. seven distinct data streams, each owned by a different specialist.
the data lived everywhere: power bi, two separate sharepoint tenants, an advertising platform, the financial system, and cross-company invoice files. nine hubs and 27+ markets, all processed one after another.
it couldn't keep up. q4 2025 was still open in late april - blocking q1 from even starting. and when a hub counterpart went quiet, there was no escalation path to unblock it.
a system, not a dashboard.
map
seven discovery calls to trace how each of the seven streams actually got pulled, by whom, and from where. we mapped country-to-hub ownership and found the bottleneck was never the math - it was sequential, manual collection with no way to escalate.
- discovery calls
- stream mapping
- bottleneck analysis
build
three agents. one pulls power bi, both sharepoint tenants and the invoice folders, staging everything with standardised naming. a second handles the advertising platform's paginated export on its own. a third merges it all into the master reconciliation workbook - country-to-hub mapping, header validation, deduplication, row-level checks.
- collection agent
- platform agent
- reconciliation agent
embed
the piece that never existed: a structured escalation and follow-up layer. when a hub counterpart doesn't act, the system chases it - so one quiet inbox can't hold an entire quarter hostage. the team runs it, and owns it.
- escalation matrix
- follow-up automation
- ongoing support
we didn't reconcile faster by hand. we automated the collection - seven streams, nine hubs, one at a time - and the quarter closed itself.
the first run finished early.
the very first production cycle came in ahead of schedule - finishing before the team had even planned to begin the work by hand.
the quarter-close went from 70-120 days to roughly 15, and around €1.1 million a year in working capital stopped sitting trapped in an open quarter.