Finance & FP&A

How to automate ap invoice approvals as Construction and Contractor Founders

Finance & FP&AFor Construction and Contractor Founders2 apps12 steps~24 min to set up

You're running a five-crew framing operation or a two-truck plumbing shop, and every subcontractor invoice lands in your Gmail as a PDF attachment — some from legit billing software, some from a Word doc someone typed on their phone. You forward them to QuickBooks manually, chase the GC or the property owner for PO numbers, and then forget to actually approve them until the sub calls you on a Thursday threatening to pull off the job. There's no formal AP workflow. Invoices sit in your inbox for 10 days because you're on the roof. Cash goes out the door on invoices you never verified against the original bid.

Build this on Starch → See the apps used

Finance & FP&AFor Construction and Contractor Founders2 apps12 steps~24 min to set up

Outcome

What you'll set up

An invoice intake queue that pulls from Gmail, matches each invoice against the QuickBooks vendor list and original bid amount, and flags anything over budget or missing a PO number before a dollar leaves your account

A weekly AP review dashboard showing every open sub invoice, how it stacks up against the job budget, and which ones have been sitting more than 7 days without action

Automated Slack alerts when a new invoice comes in over a threshold you set — say, any bill above $2,500 — so you approve it that day instead of three weeks later

The Starch recipe

Apps, data, and prompts

The combination of Starch apps, the data sources they pull from, and the prompts you use to drive them.

Apps used

Transaction Insights Task Manager

Data sources & config

Starch syncs your QuickBooks data on a schedule — vendors, bills, invoices, payments, and journal entries refresh automatically. Gmail is also a scheduled-sync provider, so Starch reads incoming messages and attachments on a schedule. Slack is connected from Starch's integration catalog; the agent queries it live to send your Monday morning AP digest. If your field software — Buildertrend, CoConstruct, or a job-cost spreadsheet in Google Drive — lives on the web, Starch automates it through your browser with no API needed.

Prompts to copy

Connect my Gmail and QuickBooks. Every time a new email arrives with a PDF attachment from one of my subcontractors, pull the invoice total, vendor name, and any PO or job number mentioned. Check the vendor against my QuickBooks vendor list. If the invoice total is more than 10% over the last bill from that same vendor, flag it and create a task for me to review before I pay it.

Build me a weekly AP queue that shows every open vendor invoice from QuickBooks, grouped by job name, with columns for invoice date, due date, amount, and whether it matches a line item in my QuickBooks estimate for that job. Highlight anything past due in red.

Every Monday at 7am, send me a Slack message listing every sub invoice that came in last week and hasn't been approved yet, sorted by due date. Include the vendor name, amount, and which job it's for.

Run these in Starch → or paste them into your favorite agent

Walkthrough

Step-by-step

1 Connect QuickBooks as a scheduled-sync provider. Starch will pull your full vendor list, open bills, payment history, and job-cost estimates on a recurring schedule — no manual exports.

2 Connect Gmail as a scheduled-sync provider. Starch monitors your inbox for emails with PDF attachments from known vendor addresses and extracts invoice data automatically.

3 Tell Starch: 'When a new invoice PDF arrives in Gmail from any vendor in my QuickBooks list, extract the amount, vendor, and any job or PO reference, then create a task in my Task Manager with the invoice details and a due date 5 days out.'

4 Set a budget-variance rule: 'If an incoming invoice from a sub is more than 10% higher than the last invoice I paid that vendor, flag the task as P1 and add a note explaining the dollar difference.' This catches surprise markups on material costs before you sign off.

5 Connect Slack from Starch's integration catalog. Build a Monday morning automation: 'Every Monday at 7am, list every open bill in QuickBooks that's due within 14 days, and post it to my #cashflow Slack channel with vendor name, job name, amount, and days until due.'

6 Wire in your Transaction Insights app to catch double payments. Tell Starch: 'Flag any transaction in my Plaid-connected checking account where the vendor name and dollar amount match an already-paid QuickBooks bill within the last 30 days.'

7 Add a PO verification step: 'When a new bill lands in QuickBooks, check whether the memo or reference field contains a PO number. If it doesn't, create a P2 task reminding me to get the PO from the sub before I pay.'

8 For subs whose invoices arrive outside Gmail — faxed, texted, dropped on your truck seat — set up a browser automation: 'Every Friday, log into my Buildertrend account, pull the list of completed work orders from this week, and create a QuickBooks bill draft for each sub who completed work but hasn't submitted an invoice yet.'

9 Review your Task Manager AP queue each morning. Tasks are sorted by due date and priority level. P1 tasks (over-budget or anomalous) sit at the top. You tap through, approve the clean ones, and investigate the flagged ones — all from your phone between site visits.

10 At month end, tell Starch: 'Show me all bills paid in the last 30 days, grouped by job name, with the original QuickBooks estimate line for that cost category next to each payment. Flag any job where actual payments have exceeded the estimate by more than 15%.' This is your cost-to-complete check without hiring a controller.

11 Set a cash-flow gate: 'If total unpaid bills due in the next 7 days exceed $18,000, send me a Slack alert and pull my current Plaid checking balance so I can see the gap.' Construction cash flow is lumpy — this gives you 7 days to chase AR before payroll bounces.

12 Once the workflow is stable, publish thresholds to your bookkeeper or office manager as a shared Starch app so they can see the same queue — no new software to buy, no login to share.

See this running on Starch

Connect your tools, describe what you want, and the agent builds it. Closed beta is free.

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Worked example

April 2026 AP close — three-job residential GC

Sample numbers from a real run

Framing sub — 412 Maple job	14,800
Electrical rough-in — 412 Maple job	4,200
Concrete flatwork — Ridgecrest duplex	9,100
Plumbing trim — Ridgecrest duplex	3,350
HVAC — River Road addition	6,600
Flagged: Framing overage — 412 Maple (+$1,400 vs bid)	1,400

It's the last week of April. You have 11 open sub invoices spread across three jobs. Starch synced QuickBooks overnight and found that your framing sub on 412 Maple submitted a bill for $14,800 — $1,400 above the $13,400 in your original estimate. It created a P1 task automatically, noting the variance. You open the task on your phone while driving to the Ridgecrest site, call the sub, find out they added blocking for a structural change you approved verbally in February but never logged as a change order. You create the change order in QuickBooks before you reach the job site. The other 10 invoices match their estimates within tolerance and have PO numbers — Starch auto-approves the task queue and posts a summary to your #cashflow Slack at 7am Monday: $23,250 in AP due by May 5, Plaid balance $41,800, no cash problem. Total time you spent on AP this week: 12 minutes on the framing call and two taps to approve the queue. The month before Starch, the same process took you a Friday afternoon and you still missed a $3,350 plumbing bill until the sub texted you.

Measurement

How you'll know it's working

Days to approve incoming sub invoice (target: under 5 days from receipt)

AP past due as a percentage of total open bills (you want this at zero entering any payroll week)

Budget variance by job: actual sub payments vs QuickBooks job-cost estimate, per trade category

Cash coverage ratio: Plaid checking balance vs AP due in next 14 days

Invoice exceptions per month — bills flagged for missing PO, budget overage, or unrecognized vendor

Comparison

What this replaces

The other ways teams handle this today, and how the Starch version compares.

QuickBooks alone (manual inbox-to-bill workflow)

QuickBooks holds the data but does nothing proactive — you still have to notice the invoice in your email, enter it manually, and remember to check for overages yourself.

Buildertrend / CoConstruct AP module

Built for project tracking, not AP approval routing — it won't cross-reference your bank balance or alert you when a bill would push a job over budget.

Bill.com

Solid AP automation for businesses with a dedicated AP clerk, but it's priced and designed for companies with volume and a finance team; overkill and oversized for a sub-20-crew shop managing 3-8 active jobs.

Procore financials

Purpose-built for construction AP but priced for commercial shops with 50+ people and an IT budget — not realistic for a small GC or specialty trade running lean.

Spreadsheet + email (current reality for most)

Free and flexible, but a $1,400 framing overage sits invisible in your inbox until the sub calls; no automated variance check, no cash-flow gate, no audit trail.

On Starch RECOMMENDED

One platform — transaction insights, task manager all running on connected data. Setup in plain English; numbers stay current via scheduled syncs and live agent queries.

Try it on Starch →

FAQ

Frequently asked questions

My subs send invoices in all formats — PDFs, photos of paper invoices, even texts. Can Starch handle that?

Starch reads Gmail attachments on a schedule and can extract data from standard PDF invoices. For photos of paper invoices or texts, the honest answer is that extraction quality depends on legibility — it works well for clean PDFs and typed documents. For invoices that arrive outside email entirely, you can build a browser automation that checks your field software (Buildertrend, CoConstruct) for completed work orders and creates bill drafts in QuickBooks for any sub who hasn't submitted yet.

Will this work with my QuickBooks job costing setup, or does it only see the basic vendor/bill data?

Starch syncs QuickBooks on a schedule and pulls invoices, bills, vendors, payments, and journal entries. It can see job or customer references attached to bills, which is how the budget-variance check works. One honest limit: QuickBooks report views like the P&L by job and Transaction List are temporarily unavailable due to an upstream connector issue — entity-level data (the actual bills and estimates) syncs normally, which is what the AP workflow runs on.

I use Buildertrend for job management but QuickBooks for actual accounting. Do both connect?

QuickBooks is a scheduled-sync provider — Starch pulls your bills, vendors, and job-cost data on a recurring schedule. Buildertrend doesn't have a direct scheduled sync, but Starch automates it through your browser with no API needed. You'd tell Starch: 'Log into my Buildertrend account, pull completed work orders from this week, and compare them against open bills in QuickBooks to find any subs who did work but haven't invoiced yet.'

Is Starch SOC 2 certified? My GC license requires I take data security seriously.

Starch is not SOC 2 Type II certified today. If your contracts or insurance requirements mandate certified vendors for financial data handling, that's worth noting. Starch connects to QuickBooks and Plaid through their standard OAuth — your credentials never live in Starch directly — but formal compliance certification is not in place yet.

What if I want my bookkeeper to see the AP queue without giving her access to my full QuickBooks?

You can publish the AP queue as a shared Starch app and invite your bookkeeper as a user. She sees the queue Starch surfaces — open bills, variance flags, task status — without needing to log into QuickBooks directly. Permissions are controlled at the Starch app level.

Can this replace a part-time bookkeeper for AP?

For the intake and flagging work — pulling invoices from Gmail, checking them against QuickBooks estimates, alerting you to overages — yes, Starch handles that without a human. For judgment calls (is this change order legitimate? should I pay a sub who's behind schedule?) you still make the call. Most owners using this cut their weekly AP time from a few hours to 15-20 minutes of decision-making on flagged items.