TimberScan to Paperless AP: A Checklist for Construction Firms

Construction firms running Sage 300 CRE know the accounts payable bottleneck well. Invoices arrive as paper, PDFs, and email attachments. They sit in someone’s inbox waiting for approval, get manually keyed into Sage, and every step adds delay, errors, and the risk that a subcontractor payment falls through the cracks during a busy project cycle.

TimberScan solves most of this by digitizing invoice capture, routing approvals electronically, and posting directly to Sage 300 CRE. But getting from your current AP workflow to a working TimberScan deployment requires more planning than the sales demo suggests. This checklist covers the steps, the integration points, and the mistakes that delay construction firms mid-migration.

Why AP Stays Manual Longer Than It Should

Most construction AP departments already have some digital tools in place. They scan invoices to PDF. They email approvals. They might even use a shared folder structure organized by project or vendor. The problem is that these partial solutions create a false sense of progress.

Scanning invoices to PDF is not paperless AP. It is paper with extra steps. The data still gets keyed manually into Sage. Approvals still happen over email, with no audit trail beyond someone’s inbox. Matching invoices to purchase orders and subcontracts still requires a human pulling up multiple screens. When a controller needs to find an invoice from six months ago, the search involves folders, email, and sometimes a phone call to the AP clerk who processed it.

The gap between “we scan our invoices” and “we have paperless AP” is where TimberScan fits. It connects the scan to the approval to the Sage posting in one workflow, with a searchable audit trail at every step.

The Migration Checklist

Moving to TimberScan is a process change as much as a software deployment. Skipping steps creates the kind of problems that make the AP team resent the new system instead of adopting it.

1. Audit Your Current AP Workflow

Before you configure anything, document how invoices actually flow through your organization today. Not how they are supposed to flow, but how they actually do. Map every step from invoice receipt through payment, including who touches the invoice, what they check, and where the data ends up.

Pay special attention to exceptions. Construction AP handles retainage, change orders, progress billing, and multi-entity invoices that standard AP automation tools were not designed for. Your workflow map should capture these variations so TimberScan’s approval routing can accommodate them from day one.

2. Clean Up Your Sage 300 CRE Data

TimberScan pulls vendor lists, job codes, cost codes, and GL accounts directly from Sage. If your Sage data has duplicate vendors, inactive cost codes that are still selectable, or inconsistent naming conventions, those problems carry straight into TimberScan and confuse every user who tries to code an invoice.

Run a vendor deduplication pass. Deactivate cost codes and GL accounts that are no longer in use. Standardize naming conventions for jobs and phases. This cleanup pays for itself even without TimberScan, but it is essential if you want the new system to be trusted by your AP team from the start.

3. Design Your Approval Routing

TimberScan supports multi-level approval workflows based on dollar thresholds, cost types, job numbers, and organizational hierarchy. The routing design is where most construction firms either over-engineer or under-engineer the system.

Over-engineering looks like requiring four approval levels for a $200 supply invoice. Under-engineering looks like routing everything to the controller regardless of amount. Neither works at scale during a busy project season.

Start with your current approval authority matrix. If you do not have one, build it before configuring TimberScan. Define clear dollar thresholds for each approval level. Assign backup approvers for every role so invoices do not stall when someone is on a jobsite or on vacation. Keep the rules simple enough that a new project manager can understand them without a training session.

4. Configure Document Scanning and Capture

TimberScan accepts invoices from scanners, email inboxes, and direct file uploads. Most construction firms benefit from a combination: a dedicated AP email address that vendors send invoices to directly, a scanner for paper invoices that still arrive by mail, and manual upload for anything that falls outside those channels.

Configure OCR (optical character recognition) settings and test them against your actual invoice types. Construction invoices vary widely in format, from standardized AIA billing forms to handwritten material receipts. OCR accuracy depends on scan quality and template configuration, so budget time for tuning before you go live.

5. Run a Parallel Period

Do not cut over to TimberScan all at once. Run both your existing process and TimberScan in parallel for at least one full billing cycle. Process the same invoices through both systems and compare the results.

The parallel period reveals configuration gaps that testing alone will not catch: approval routing that does not handle a specific invoice type, OCR misreads on certain vendor formats, or Sage posting rules that need adjustment. Fixing these issues during a parallel period is routine maintenance. Fixing them after a hard cutover is a crisis that disrupts payment schedules.

6. Train by Role, Not by Feature

AP clerks, project managers, and controllers each interact with TimberScan differently. Training the entire AP team on every feature wastes time and creates confusion.

Train AP clerks on scanning, coding, and invoice submission. Train project managers on reviewing and approving invoices assigned to their jobs. Train controllers and AP managers on exception handling, reporting, and the Sage posting workflow. Each group needs about 30 to 60 minutes of focused, role-specific instruction rather than a two-hour walkthrough of the entire application.

7. Establish Ongoing Maintenance

TimberScan is not a set-and-forget deployment. New vendors need to be added to Sage and synced to TimberScan. New jobs require routing rule updates. Approval hierarchies change as project managers rotate between jobs. Assign an AP lead or IT coordinator as the system owner responsible for configuration changes and first-line troubleshooting.

Common Pitfalls

Three issues stall more TimberScan deployments than any technical problem:

• Skipping the Sage data cleanup. Dirty vendor and cost code data makes invoice coding slow and error-prone, which turns the AP team against the system before it has a chance to prove its value.
• Designing approval routing in isolation. If project managers and superintendents are not involved in designing the approval workflow, they will push back on the routing rules after go-live. Get field input before you finalize the configuration.
• Treating the migration as an IT project. TimberScan changes how the AP department works every day. The controller or AP manager should own the project, with IT providing infrastructure and application support. When IT owns it alone, the result is a technically correct system that nobody wants to use.

Extending TimberScan with Power Apps

TimberScan handles the core AP workflow well, but construction firms often need functionality around the edges that a packaged product was not designed for. Field receipt capture is a common example: a superintendent buys materials at a supply house and needs to submit the receipt immediately from a phone, coded to the right job and cost code, before the paper gets lost in a truck cab.

Custom Power Apps built on Microsoft 365 can fill these gaps. A receipt capture app that feeds into the same SharePoint and Sage data layer as TimberScan gives the field a mobile-first submission tool while keeping the AP team’s workflow intact. Power Automate handles the handoff between systems, and Power BI provides reporting that spans both TimberScan data and field submissions in a single dashboard.

This is the approach Infonaligy used with a regional construction firm whose invoice and receipt workflow integrated TimberScan, Sage, Adobe Scan, and custom Power Apps into a single coordinated system. The key is building on the same data foundation rather than adding another disconnected tool to the stack.

Getting the Migration Right

A TimberScan deployment done well eliminates manual data entry, gives controllers real-time visibility into AP status by job, and creates an audit trail that survives staff turnover and bonding company reviews. Done poorly, it becomes another half-adopted tool that the AP team works around instead of through.

The difference is almost always in the planning: clean data, thoughtful routing design, parallel testing, and role-specific training. If your firm is running Sage 300 CRE and still processing AP manually, the technology to fix it exists today. The checklist above is how you implement it without disrupting the billing cycles your cash flow depends on.