Finance & FP&A

How to automate ap invoice approvals as Event Agency Founders

Finance & FP&AFor Event Agency Founders2 apps10 steps~20 min to set up

You're juggling vendor invoices from catering companies, AV rental houses, florists, and venue coordinators all coming in through Gmail threads that are buried three events deep. QuickBooks or a spreadsheet is your AP ledger, but approval 'workflow' is you forwarding an email to a business partner and waiting for a reply. Invoices for the wrong event get paid, duplicate charges slip through during a busy production week, and you're reconciling which invoices map to which event budget after the fact — sometimes weeks later. There's no system that knows an invoice belongs to the Hartley wedding versus the Q3 corporate offsite.

Build this on Starch → See the apps used

Finance & FP&AFor Event Agency Founders2 apps10 steps~20 min to set up

Outcome

What you'll set up

A live invoice tracking surface that pulls every vendor charge from your connected accounts and tags each invoice to the correct event — so you always know what's outstanding, approved, and paid across your entire book of business.

An automated approval flow that catches invoices above a threshold, drafts a review note for your business partner or client, and logs the decision — without a single forwarded email.

Anomaly alerts that flag when a vendor charges more than their quoted amount or when a new vendor hits your account for the first time, so surprises don't live in the bank statement until month-end.

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 Plaid bank and credit account data on a schedule, so transaction data is always current without manual exports. For invoices living in Gmail, connect Gmail from Starch's scheduled-sync connection — Starch reads your inbox and can surface vendor email threads by event keyword. If your vendors send invoices through a portal that requires login (like a venue's client portal), Starch automates that site through your browser — no API needed.

Prompts to copy

Pull every transaction from my Plaid accounts from the last 90 days, group them by vendor, and show me which ones are over $500 and haven't been matched to an event budget yet.

When a new charge comes in from any vendor I haven't paid before, create a task with P1 priority and a note saying 'New vendor — confirm this matches an approved quote before the next reconciliation.'

Build me an AP approval tracker that lists every open invoice by event name, vendor, quoted amount, actual charge, and approval status — with a flag any time the actual charge is more than 10% above the quote.

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

Walkthrough

Step-by-step

1 Connect your business checking and credit card accounts via Plaid. Starch syncs your transaction data on a schedule — every vendor charge, every payout, every fee shows up automatically.

2 Connect Gmail so Starch can read vendor invoice threads. Starch syncs your messages and you describe how to identify invoice emails: 'any email with the word invoice, attached PDF, or subject line containing quote number from a vendor domain.'

3 Open Transaction Insights and tell Starch how your events are named — 'I have active events called Hartley Wedding, TechCorp Q3 Offsite, and Rivera Quinceañera. Tag every transaction to the matching event when the vendor name or memo matches any line item in my budget sheet.'

4 Set your approval threshold. Tell Starch: 'Any invoice over $1,200 needs a confirmation task created before I mark it approved.' Starch creates a P1 task in Task Manager with the vendor name, amount, and event it's linked to.

5 Build the AP approval tracker. Describe it in plain language: 'Show me a table with columns for Event, Vendor, Invoice Date, Quoted Amount, Actual Charge, Variance, and Approval Status. Pull charges from Plaid and match them against a budget I'll paste in.'

6 Wire the anomaly alerts. Tell Starch: 'Flag any transaction where the charge is more than 10% above what I've recorded as the quoted amount for that vendor on that event.' You'll get a daily digest or an immediate task depending on how you configure it.

7 Handle new vendors. Starch monitors for first-time vendor charges and creates a task: 'New vendor [name] charged $[amount] on [date] — verify this matches an approved vendor and event before reconciling.'

8 For vendor portals with no email invoice delivery — say your AV rental house uses an online portal — tell Starch: 'Log into [portal URL], pull the outstanding invoice list for my account, and add any unpaid invoices to my AP tracker.' Starch automates that through your browser with no API needed.

9 At event close, run a reconciliation. Tell Starch: 'Pull all transactions tagged to the Hartley Wedding, compare totals to my budget by vendor category — catering, florals, AV, venue — and show me where we came in over or under.' You get a clean event P&L in plain English.

10 Share the summary with your client or business partner. Starch formats the reconciled event spend into a readable summary you can email directly or paste into your client-facing reporting doc.

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

TechCorp Q3 Offsite — September 2026 AP Close

Sample numbers from a real run

Venue deposit (Convene, 14th floor)	4,200
AV rental (SoundPro)	2,850
Catering (Harvest & Rowe)	7,400
Photography (Lira Studio)	1,800
Branded swag (Stitch & Press)	960

Your Plaid sync pulls 5 vendor charges against the TechCorp Q3 Offsite budget the morning after the event. Transaction Insights flags two issues immediately: SoundPro charged $2,850 against a quoted $2,400 — a $450 variance — and Stitch & Press is a vendor that's never charged your account before. Starch creates two P1 tasks: 'SoundPro charge $450 over quote — confirm scope change was approved' and 'New vendor Stitch & Press $960 — verify against signed contract before paying.' You reply to the SoundPro task with a note that you approved an extra hour of setup labor on-site, Starch marks it approved and logs your note. You check the Stitch & Press contract in your Google Drive (connected from Starch's integration catalog — the agent queries it live), confirm the amount matches, and mark it cleared. Total reconciled event spend is $17,210 against a $17,500 budget. Starch formats the event P&L and you send it to the TechCorp contact before their accounts payable team even asks for it.

Measurement

How you'll know it's working

Invoice-to-payment cycle time per event (days from invoice received to payment sent)

Budget variance by vendor category across all active events (% over/under quoted)

Number of first-time vendor charges that required manual verification per quarter

Duplicate or erroneous charges caught before payment, tracked per event

Outstanding AP balance across all active events at any point in the month

Comparison

What this replaces

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

QuickBooks + manual email forwarding

QuickBooks records what got paid but doesn't automate the approval step, flag vendor variances against event budgets, or tie transactions back to specific events without manual category coding.

HoneyBook or Dubsado built-in invoicing

Handles client-facing invoices well but doesn't manage vendor AP at all — you still need a separate system for what you owe, and there's no anomaly detection or approval workflow.

Spreadsheet (Google Sheets + Gmail)

Totally customizable but entirely manual — every invoice has to be entered, every approval is a forwarded email, and there's no alert when a vendor overcharges or a new charge appears.

Xero (connected from Starch's integration catalog)

Stronger accounting foundation than QuickBooks for some agency workflows, but same gap: it records what happened, it doesn't flag vendor variance against your quoted amounts or automate the approval routing.

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

Does Starch actually read my vendor invoices out of Gmail, or does it just see that an email arrived?

Starch syncs your Gmail messages on a schedule and can read the body and attachments. You can tell Starch exactly what to look for — 'find emails with PDF attachments from any domain I haven't paid before' or 'flag any email with the word invoice in the subject line from a vendor not already in my approved list.' It won't process every email you've ever received by default; you describe the rules and Starch applies them.

I use both a business checking account and an American Express card for vendor payments. Does Plaid pick up both?

Yes. Plaid connects to most major US banks and credit card issuers. You connect each account separately and Starch syncs transactions from all of them. Your AP tracker can pull from all connected accounts at once, so you're not reconciling two separate ledgers.

What if a vendor sends invoices through a portal instead of by email — like a venue management system I have to log into?

Starch automates that through your browser — no API needed. Tell Starch the URL and your login credentials, and it navigates the portal, pulls the invoice list, and adds anything outstanding to your AP tracker. This works for any site you can log into and click through, even if the vendor has never heard of an API.

Is Starch SOC 2 Type II certified? My corporate clients ask about this.

Not yet. Starch is not currently SOC 2 Type II certified. If your client contracts require that certification from every tool in your stack, that's worth knowing upfront. It's on the roadmap.

I don't use QuickBooks — I track event budgets in a Google Sheet. Can Starch still match transactions to my budget?

Yes. Connect Google Sheets from Starch's integration catalog — the agent queries it live when your AP tracker runs. Tell Starch: 'My event budgets are in this Sheet. When a Plaid transaction comes in, match the vendor name to the corresponding line item and flag any variance over 10%.' You don't need accounting software for this to work.

Can Starch send an approval request to my business partner or a client without me in the middle?

You can build an automation that drafts an email via your connected Gmail account and sends it when an invoice hits the approval threshold. Tell Starch: 'When a vendor invoice over $1,500 is flagged, draft an email to [partner email] with the vendor name, amount, event, and a link to the invoice, and ask for a reply confirmation.' Starch drafts it; you decide whether it sends automatically or sits in your drafts for a final check.