Cut AP processing time by 84% with end-to-end invoice capture and Xero reconciliation.

Canam has been building since 1955, and today it runs as three businesses under one roof — Construction, Interiors and Joinery — each touching dozens of live sites at once. That history is exactly what made its accounts-payable problem so stubborn. Every month the team hand-keyed thousands of subcontractor and merchant invoices, and each one demanded a judgement call before it could touch Xero: the right GL code, the right job cost centre, and a clean split across whichever division actually incurred the cost. Construction billing is never tidy, so on top of straight supply invoices the team was forever untangling variations, retentions and progress claims, the same supplier landing against several jobs in a week with different treatment each time.

The knock-on effects all landed on the commercial team. Coding came out inconsistent because it depended on whoever happened to key the invoice that day. Approvals stalled while project managers chased paper from the field. Month-end close slipped later and later as the backlog grew. Worst of all, mistakes stayed invisible until reconciliation — by which point a miscoded job cost or a missed retention had already flowed into reporting and was slow and expensive to unwind.

Rather than bolt on another piece of accounting software, we set out to give Canam its own operating system for the back office — a Company OS that sits across the tools the business already runs and does the work the way Canam does it, not the way a generic vendor assumes. The difference is the knowledge underneath it. We trained the coding agents on Canam’s own Xero history, so the system proposes the right code, cost centre, divisional split and live job number because it has learned how this business — not some textbook contractor — actually books its costs.

From there the OS became the place AP simply happens. Every invoice, however it arrives — a PDF, an emailed attachment, a photo snapped on a site — is captured, read and coded against the right job. Retentions, variations and progress claims, the awkward construction-specific cases, run through bespoke handling so they are treated consistently every time instead of left to interpretation. Approvals moved onto the phones in people’s pockets, with value-based thresholds and automatic purchase-order matching, so a project manager clears them from the field. Anything the system is confident about posts straight to Xero; only genuinely low-confidence or exception items are held back for a person, so human attention goes where it counts.

The result was less a tool and more a change in how the company runs its money. Processing time fell by 84%, the chronic month-end backlog cleared, and supplier runs turned from a scramble into a steady, predictable cycle. Coding accuracy kept climbing as the OS absorbed each division’s patterns, so reporting could finally be trusted as it landed. And because it is Canam’s own system rather than a static product, it keeps learning from every invoice — the unforeseen part of the adventure being how quickly the team stopped thinking of AP as the thing standing between them and a clean close.