How automation removed 18 hours/week of pay-app reconciliation inside a national home builder

Before founding Confluxion Point, our founder built and ran the data function inside a national home builder. One of the builds from that seat: an automation pipeline that replaced roughly 18 hours a weekof manual pay-app reconciliation between the project-management system and Sage 300 CRE — the same pattern we now build for construction firms. Here's exactly what it looked like.

The setting

A national home builder's back office: dozens of active communities, a project-management system as the source of truth for commitments, change orders, and subcontractor billing, and Sage 300 CREas the financial book of record, with Microsoft 365 for everything else. A senior project accountant owned the entire pay-app pipeline. The two systems didn't share a schema, and the native connector option had been evaluated and rejected because the line-item mapping didn't match the cost-code conventions in use.

The before

Every cycle, the pay-app process ate roughly 18 hours per week during pay-app week — and that was after years of the accounting team optimizing it down by hand. The process:

• Export subcontractor billing schedules from the PM system, by project, to Excel.
• Export committed cost reports from Sage 300 CRE, by project, to Excel.
• Open both side by side. Reconcile vendor name discrepancies (one system had “ABC Plumbing,” the other had “ABC Plumbing & Mechanical”). Reconcile cost-code discrepancies (a code renamed in one system six months ago, never propagated to the other).
• Hand-build each subcontractor's pay app PDF. Route for signature. Email each pay app to the controller for review.
• Re-key approved amounts back into Sage 300 CRE for AP processing.
• Catch the inevitable rejections — wrong amount, missing lien waiver, sub bumped a cost code — and start the relevant pieces over.

The honest description of pay-app week: open a spreadsheet on Friday, close it on Tuesday, and do nothing else in between.

The build

The same structure we now run as a Confluxion engagement — blueprint the workflow, fix the scope, build with embedded check-ins, walk through, hand over. The technical architecture, briefly:

• Ingestion.Scheduled exports from the PM system (via its API) and Sage 300 CRE (via its ODBC interface) into a small staging database inside the company's Azure tenant.
• Reconciliation.A fuzzy-match layer for vendor names (Levenshtein distance against a maintained alias table) and a cost-code crosswalk maintained by the project accountant in a SharePoint list. Anything that couldn't auto-match flagged for human review, with a one-click resolution UI.
• Pay app assembly. Templated PDF generation per subcontractor, pulling approved billings, lien waivers (matched by document metadata in the existing SharePoint), and the required AIA-style cover sheets. Output dropped into a per-month review folder, sorted by sub.
• Approval workflow. Review via SharePoint with comment-and-approve, then automated re-key into Sage 300 CRE for AP processing.
• Reject loop. Common rejection patterns coded as guard clauses up front (missing lien waiver, retainage math error, sub with prior unresolved variance). Rejections drop to a dashboard the accountant clears in minutes, not days.

The result

• 18 hours/week of senior accounting time removed, every cycle. At roughly $95/hr loaded, that's about $7,400 per cycle, or ~$89,000 per year in recovered capacity.
• Pay-app cycle compressed from 5 days to 1 day. Subcontractors got paid faster, which improved relationships measurably.
• WIP report variance eliminated. The system produces the same numbers the WIP report uses, so the two don't disagree at quarter-end.
• It kept running. After handover to the accounting team, the system ran cycle after cycle with no engineering changes beyond cost-code crosswalk updates the accountant made herself through the runbook.

Nobody opens a spreadsheet on Friday anymore.

What this build was, and what it wasn't

What it was: a focused automation build that retired one of the highest-leverage manual workflows in the back office — scoped up front, shipped on the plan, owned by the team that used it.

What it wasn't: a digital transformation initiative, a software product, or a multi-quarter consulting engagement. One workflow. Done well. Handed over.

Every Confluxion automation engagement is scoped to look like this. Pay apps, subcontractor compliance, Sage exports, AP triage, vendor compliance tracking. If you're running a similar process at similar volume — twenty-plus active jobs, a senior accountant doing 12+ hours of manual reconciliation per cycle — there's a good chance the math works the same way for you.

And: an AI audit will surface this kind of workflow as a side effect. The fourth deliverable on every audit is a Workflow Friction Report — a ranked list of automation candidates with estimated hours back. We don't require the audit to lead to an automation build. We do require the automation build to start with a real understanding of where the time is actually going.

This case study describes a system our founder designed, built, and ran in-house at a national home builder before Confluxion Point was formed. Employer name withheld; identifying details generalized. Hours are the accounting team's own conservative estimate.