Contract to Cash: The Part of AP Automation Most Finance Teams Still Do By Hand

Ask most finance teams if their accounts payable process is automated, and the answer is usually yes, with an asterisk. Bills get captured automatically. Payments go out on a schedule. Somewhere in the CFO's slide deck, there's a line about "AP automation" that's technically true.

Then ask what happens between the moment a vendor contract gets signed and the moment that payment actually gets reconciled against it, and the asterisk gets a lot bigger. For most companies, that middle stretch is still a patchwork: a contract sitting in someone's inbox, a renewal date nobody's tracking, a payment that goes out and then needs a person to manually check it against the right line item. The two ends are automated. The connective tissue isn't.

That gap is the whole reason we're doing this webinar.

Two Halves of the Same Problem

Stackpack sits on the vendor side of this. We track what you're actually spending, flag contracts before they auto-renew at a worse price, catch the duplicate or "ghost" vendors nobody remembers signing up for, and route new vendor requests to the right approver automatically. That's the layer that answers "who are we paying, what did we agree to, and is anything about to surprise us."

Forwardly sits on the payment side. They capture bills, execute payments, and reconcile transactions without someone manually matching line items after the fact. That's the layer that answers "did the money move correctly, and can we prove it."

Neither half solves the other half's problem. Say your vendor record is clean and current, but payments still get reconciled by hand, someone eyeballing a bank feed against a spreadsheet at month end. Or flip it: payments fire on schedule like clockwork, but nobody caught that the vendor's contract quietly renewed at 20% higher pricing three months ago, so the automated payment is now paying the wrong amount, correctly, every month, without complaint. Most finance teams end up automating each end separately and then bridging them with exactly the kind of manual work automation was supposed to remove.

What We're Actually Getting Into on the Call

On September 23, I'm joining Nick Chandi, CEO and co-founder of Forwardly, for a live conversation about what it looks like to treat AP as one continuous cycle instead of two automated ends with a manual middle. Jane Ingram, Forwardly's Director of Operations and Marketing, is moderating.

We'll get into where the manual gaps actually live for most finance teams, what it costs to keep working around them, and how thinking about vendor management and payment automation as one workflow, rather than two separate tools, changes what "automated AP" can actually mean. If you've ever had someone reconcile a payment against a contract that was sitting in the wrong inbox, you already know the gap we're talking about.

AI Automation from Contract to Cash Out: Vendor Management to Payment Automation and Reconciliation September 23, 2026 · 10:00 AM PT / 1:00 PM ET Register here

Why This Matters Beyond the Hour

Neither Stackpack nor Forwardly is claiming to have solved this end to end. That's honestly the more interesting conversation: two companies that each own one half of the cycle, talking through where the real seams are and what it would take to close them. If you're a CFO, controller, or AP manager who's automated the easy parts and is still doing the middle by hand, this is built for you.

Can't make it live? Register anyway and we'll send the replay.

In the meantime, if you want to see what the vendor and contract side of this looks like inside Stackpack specifically, schedule a demo.