If you asked your back office team to pull up every dollar spent on a specific project right now, could they do it?
Or would they have to dig through a physical box of receipts, check a spreadsheet for side notes, sift through papers on their desk, check for invoices sent to an individual employee’s work email or non-centralized AP inbox, and log into a separate accounting system just to give you an answer?
For most contracting businesses, Accounts Payable (AP) is the "messy middle" of operations. When AP lives in siloed systems disconnected from your operational software, it creates a massive blind spot.
In fact, 52% of AP professionals report spending more than ten hours a week just processing invoices, and 61% are still manually keying invoices into their accounting software. Between "ghost expenses" like emergency hardware store runs, paper vendor invoices, and the endless flood of emails, financial data becomes fragmented.
The result? Your job costing data is disconnected and unreliable. You might be looking at a project thinking it is highly profitable, when in reality, missed expenses mean it’s actually bleeding cash.
ServiceTitan has refreshed the Accounts Payable suite to help contractors "crawl, walk, and run" toward better financial control—starting with a foundational set of free tools you can use today.
Step 1: Crawl
Centralize Your Spending with Free Core Features
Before you can automate your business, you need to organize it. The first step in fixing job costing is ensuring that every job and project expense has a centralized home within your operational system. Here’s how ServiceTitan’s core Accounts Payable features have been enhanced to help you build this critical foundation.
Capture Every Cost (Even Without a PO)
For most contracting businesses, at least 25% of their monthly invoices never go through a formal purchase order (PO) process. These are often the "ghost expenses" that plague your bottom line. When these expenses live outside your operational software, your job-costing data becomes a guessing game. ServiceTitan solves this by allowing you to easily create non-PO bills while maintaining financial accuracy by capturing all job- and project-related costs immediately. By bringing these stray costs into a centralized system, you ensure that your financial data reflects reality. This means your back office gains true, real-time visibility from the field, allowing you to gauge project profitability rather than operating in the dark.
Manage Vendor Credits & Statements
Tracking early-pay discounts, vendor statements, and vendor credits manually is a painful, time-consuming process that often leads to lost savings. It is incredibly easy for a paper credit memo to get lost in the shuffle, meaning you end up leaving money on the table that rightfully belongs to your bottom line. With ServiceTitan's enhanced free AP suite, you can confidently manage and track vendor credits directly within the platform to ensure costs are error-free before they are exported and paid. Additionally, you can manage your vendor statements in ServiceTitan to ensure thorough review, prevent surprises at month-end, and keep costs accurate. This built-in system safeguards your cash flow, ensuring you aren't accidentally overpaying vendors or missing out on vital credits and discounts.
Review Before You Export
Catching errors after they have already hit your general ledger creates massive headaches and wastes hours for your accounting team. The key to a clean accounting system is preventing bad data from entering it in the first place. ServiceTitan provides a built-in review process that allows your team to organize, review, and reconcile bills for accuracy before they are exported to your system of record, like QuickBooks or Intacct. This ensures you catch discrepancies early and maintain bulletproof financial accuracy. As Jessica Woodruff Smith of AirWorks Solutions notes, this centralization is transformative: “With ServiceTitan, I don't have errors to deal with. All the information gets to my general ledger. I no longer have to export batches; it just shows up in QuickBooks. It's beautiful”.
Step 2: Walk
Automate for Speed and Scale (Advanced Tools)
Once your data is centralized and organized, you’re ready to automate the manual processes that can be a severe bottleneck for your growing business.
When you are ready to "run," ServiceTitan’s Intelligent AP Automation suite (available as a paid add-on package) removes the drudgery of data entry. This upgrade includes an Automated AP Inbox that uses Optical Character Recognition (OCR) and AI to scan emailed bills and automatically turn them into system-ready drafts.
It also features Automated 3-Way Matching, which instantly compares your vendor bills against your purchase orders and receipts, automatically flagging discrepancies in price, quantity, or shipping. This means your team only spends time managing exceptions, not double-checking math.
Step 3: Run
Take Strategic Control of Your Expense Management (Advanced Tools)
Accounting teams need efficient ways to pay bills, while maintaining audit trails and process control. ServiceTitan’s Intelligent AP suite is launching bill pay features (coming soon) that will give you greater payment control, including the ability to hold or delay payments on bad projects strategically or to optimize cash flow.
Complete Financial Visibility
By centralizing your core workflows, you gain a true "single source of truth." You get the highly accurate job costing data you need to bid smarter on future projects, and your back-office team reclaims hours of their week.
Whether you are ready to start centralizing your bills today simply, or you are looking to put your entire accounts payable process on autopilot in the future, ServiceTitan has solutions for you.
Ready to take control of your expenses?
Watch the webinar: "Accounts Payable Essentials" to see these free tools and best practices in action.
Learn more about AP: and how it seamlessly integrates with your accounting software to protect your bottom line.
Contact us for a demo: to discuss which AP solution is right for your business stage and get started today.
Results may vary based on individual business circumstances, existing processes, system configuration, and user adoption—statistics based on third-party industry research and customer insights. ServiceTitan's Accounts Payable suite is designed to improve efficiency and accuracy, but does not guarantee specific outcomes, time savings, or the complete prevention of errors or fraud. Features and functionality may vary by subscription level and are subject to change. Early Access features are in development, and functionality may be limited. Users remain responsible for reviewing all financial data and transactions for accuracy and compliance with applicable laws and regulations.
