Customer background
Multiple entities, three regions, no single source of truth
RecordPoint is a leader in data and AI governance, supporting highly-regulated organizations worldwide in managing policy, governance, and compliance to enable safe use of AI. With multiple operating entities and a rapid growth trajectory, the finance function faced mounting complexity as purchasing, vendor reviews, and AP processes were scattered across spreadsheets, email threads, and disparate systems.
From its Seattle office in the US, RecordPoint’s finance team managed vendors, approvals, contracts, and payments across NA, EMEA and APAC. Without a single source of truth, the team struggled with visibility: Was every service authorized? Did each expense link to a contract? What untouched liabilities sat unnoticed? The result was operational friction, escalating risk, and lack of control.
The challenge
Uniting purchasing with vendor, contract and payment oversight
RecordPoint’s core financial control challenge was simple in concept yet difficult in practice: uniting purchasing workflows with vendor, contract, and payment oversight under one finance-owned process. Instead, the team faced:
- Fragmented processes Requests for software, consulting, hardware, and services traversed email chains, separate systems, and offline trackers.
- Delayed approvals Business buyers frequently initiated purchases unaware of legal, security, or finance gatekeeping—leaving finance to reconcile after the fact.
- Obscured liabilities Without visibility into “requests pending” and “commitments made but not yet invoiced,” finance lacked an accurate spend forecast or contract-liability register.
- Audit vulnerability With approvals disconnected from purchases and contracts, month-end close became a scramble due to time spent tracking spend, chasing missing approvals, and flagging off-policy payments.
Rachana GuptaVP of Finance, RecordPoint “There were misses here and there we had to fix retroactively — approvals, vendor reviews, visibility — because it wasn’t all in one place.”
The solution
A procure-to-pay control layer, owned by finance
Enter Derive, a modern AI-native spend control platform built for finance teams, offering a modular procure-to-pay control layer. The implementation at RecordPoint focused on:
- Unified intake and approval workflows All purchase categories (software, hardware, consulting) funneled into one platform. Business owners submitted requests, finance defined thresholds, and approvers were embedded into automated flows.
- Vendor & contract governance built in Requests triggered vendor and contract reviews before any PO or invoice existed, ensuring every dollar spent had a vetted vendor and valid agreement.
- AP automation with entity/currency control As bills arrived, Derive’s OCR and workflow engine automatically coded to correct entity and currency, matched invoices to POs/contracts, and surfaced exceptions.
- Real-time spend visibility Finance now accessed a dashboard showing committed, approved but unspent, and paid liabilities across entities—full spend lifecycle under one lens.
- Integration with Xero Derive’s native Xero integration synchronized vendor data, invoices, and payments in real time, automatically posting approved bills, linking them to their corresponding POs and contracts, and maintaining a unified audit trail across entities.
Derive worked hands‑on with RecordPoint’s finance team to implement best‑practice, finance‑owned workflows covering the full purchase‑to‑payment lifecycle and rolled out consistently across RecordPoint’s global entities.
Results & ROI
From reactive control to strategic oversight
- 95% of spend pre-authorized With business owners now submitting all requests into Derive and controls kicking in automatically, the finance team achieved near-complete pre-authorization coverage within months.
- $120K+ cost avoidance Visibility into pending commitments and flagged renewals enabled RecordPoint to renegotiate, cancel, and optimize contracts, generating meaningful savings.
- 5× faster invoice processing AP throughput improved significantly thanks to PO/invoice matching and automated workflows, freeing finance to focus on analysis rather than chasing missing approvals or invoices.
Beyond raw numbers, finance leaders at RecordPoint remarked on qualitative shifts:
- A true single source of truth replaced fragmented Excel trackers.
- Audit preparation can be completed in a routine manner.
- Business units welcomed self-serve transparency: fewer “What’s the status?” emails.
- The finance team moved from reactive control to strategic oversight.
Matt WoodCFO, RecordPoint “Derive gave us control over a chaotic spend process without adding complexity. It’s become the system our entire business relies on to manage spend with confidence.”
Why it matters
Not just automation, but orchestration
For SMB organizations using accounting systems such as Xero, the challenge is not just “automation” but “orchestration.” Derive addresses not only how things are paid but how things are approved, governed, and tracked before payment ever happens. In a world where finance owns the outcome but not always the process, Derive offers a platform where finance leads rather than follows.