Premier Lighting processes more than 600 invoices a month across a business that includes national distribution, retail showrooms and e-commerce.
For a lean team, entering every invoice manually into NetSuite was becoming difficult to sustain.
With AP Genius, Tvarana’s AI OCR solution for NetSuite AP, Premier Lighting automated invoice capture and three-way matching, giving the team more time to focus on vendor accounts, prepayments and other work that actually needs human attention.
Premier Lighting supplies lighting products to multifamily housing companies, builders and apartment communities across the United States.
The business also operates retail showrooms in Scottsdale and Tucson, Arizona, along with an e-commerce channel.
Headquarters: Arizona, United States
Industry: Lighting Distribution / Retail
Teams involved: Quality Control / Accounts Payable
Premier Lighting runs with a lean AP setup. Accounts payable sits with the Quality Control Coordinator rather than a large dedicated AP team, making efficiency especially important as invoice volumes grow.
Premier Lighting has a lot of moving parts.
It distributes lighting products nationally, operates two retail showrooms in Arizona and also sells through e-commerce.
As Jesse Wampole, Quality Control Coordinator at Premier Lighting, explains, that complexity can create its own AP challenges.
Before AP Genius, invoices were entered into NetSuite manually.
Every field had to be keyed in. Three-way matching was also done by hand.
The process worked, but it took time.
And as invoice volume grew beyond 600 invoices a month, the amount of manual work became increasingly difficult for a lean team to manage.
“Before we got this solution, [it was] done in NetSuite manually, field by field, key by key... three-way match was done by hand. It was accurate, but it was very time-consuming. When we do upwards of 600 or more invoices, it became hard.”
-Jesse Wampole, Quality Control Coordinator, Premier Lighting
Tvarana worked with Premier Lighting to implement AP Genius, its AI OCR solution for NetSuite AP.
AP Genius captures invoice information and helps automate three-way matching, reducing the amount of manual data entry required from the team.
There is no need to manually code invoices or build templates for different invoice formats.
Premier Lighting also had an existing relationship with 79Consulting through previous projects, so the team already understood its NetSuite environment and how the business operates.
The goal was simple: help Premier Lighting handle growing invoice volumes without simply adding more manual work.
The biggest difference was not just faster invoice processing.
It was what the team could do with the time they got back.
Instead of spending much of the day manually entering bills into NetSuite, the team could spend more time reconciling vendor accounts, keeping track of prepayments and recurring bills, and managing vendor relationships.
Jesse puts it simply:
“AP is not just an acronym [anymore]. They have more time to reconcile vendor [accounts], stay on top of prepayments... they're not just manually entering bills into NetSuite all day. They're able to do more of the relationships work.”
Jesse Wampole, Quality Control Coordinator, Premier Lighting
That shift matters for a lean finance team.
AI OCR takes on more of the repetitive data-entry work, while people stay focused on the areas where judgment, follow-up and relationships still matter.
AI OCR can sound more complicated than it needs to be.
For Premier Lighting, one of the benefits was that the team did not need AI expertise to start using the solution.
There was no need to manually build templates or understand what was happening behind the technology.
As Jesse explains:
“It's quick and it just works. It doesn't require manual coding, template matching. You don't need to be an AI expert or know a whole lot about the inner workings of how that stuff works. That's what the AI does, it does all [the work] for you.”
Jesse Wampole, Quality Control Coordinator, Premier Lighting
AP processes often reach their limit gradually.
Invoice volumes grow, but the same team keeps absorbing the extra manual work.
For Premier Lighting, more than 600 invoices a month could still be processed accurately by hand. The question was whether that approach would continue to scale.
Automating the repetitive part of AP meant the business did not have to treat additional headcount as the only way to handle higher invoice volumes.
That is where AI OCR can make a practical difference.
It can take on the manual capture and matching work, while the AP team spends more time on exceptions, reconciliations, vendor relationships and the financial work that still needs a person.
Every AP process is different.
Let’s look at how invoices move through your NetSuite environment today and where AI OCR could reduce manual work.
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