Finance in Speedlr: purchasing, AP, unit-rate billing and live project profitability

How purchasing, supplier invoices, AI receipt analysis, unit-rate billing and project profitability fit together in one telecom construction finance workflow.

Finance teams in telecom construction spend most of their time doing forensic work. Which of last month's material receipts belong to which project? Which completed spans were never billed? Why is the margin on this build four points below the estimate? None of these are hard questions when the data is captured in context — they are only hard when finance is reconstructing operations after the fact.

Speedlr's finance workflow starts before any money moves, at purchasing. A purchase order is raised against a project and a cost code, so the commitment exists in the numbers the moment it is approved rather than when the invoice arrives weeks later. Receipts against that PO update inventory, and materials issued to a work order become project cost tied to a specific geography and crew.

Supplier invoices are where the AI does the tedious part. Drop the invoice or receipt files in and Speedlr extracts the vendor, dates, line items, quantities, tax and totals, then proposes a match against the open purchase order and receipt. Three-way matching becomes a review of exceptions rather than a keying exercise, and the AP inbox stops being the place where project cost goes to hide.

On the revenue side, the price book is attached to the work order when the work is defined, not when it is billed. Field completion produces verified quantities — spans, structures, drops, hours — and those quantities are already priced. An approval chain sits between completion and invoice, so a project manager confirms the production before finance sends anything to the customer.

Because both sides of the ledger reference the same work order, project profitability is a live view rather than a monthly close artefact. Committed cost, actual cost, earned revenue and billed revenue sit side by side per project, per phase, and per segment on the map. When a build starts to slip below plan, the pattern is usually visible in unit productivity long before it shows in the P&L.

Everything fits together because nothing is re-entered. The purchase order, the receipt, the field completion, the customer invoice and the as-built all point at the same operational record. Finance is not translating operations into accounting — it is reading it.

The cash effect is the one that gets noticed. When completed work is priced and evidenced at the moment it is done, the gap between production and invoicing collapses from weeks to days, and days-sales-outstanding improves for the simple reason that invoices are correct the first time.