How Aeon Cleared a 200-Invoice Approval Backlog Across 50+ Entities
Aeon is a nonprofit affordable housing owner, developer, and manager operating across Minnesota, with over 5,000 apartments and townhomes spanning 58 properties. Managing AP across more than 50 individual property entities — each with its own coding requirements, vendors, and approval chains — demands a system built for genuine complexity. Greg Stegman, Aeon's Controller, has worked through more enterprise software implementations than he can count, and knows exactly what going backwards looks like.
AP Infrastructure Built for One System — Now It Had to Be Rebuilt
When Aeon switched its primary enterprise software, a carefully built AP process suddenly had no home. The old system had handled everything in one place: invoices scanned and preloaded automatically, workflows routed to the right approvers, data synced to the financial system without manual rekeying. Splitting that apart meant replacing years of work — under a hard deadline.
Three requirements were non-negotiable — and most systems they evaluated failed at least one:
- Entity and dimension capture — invoice ingestion had to cleanly identify Sage Intacct location/entity codes and custom user-defined dimensions. Most systems couldn't capture location at all.
- Complex, multi-step approval workflows — depending on invoice type, amount, and department, an invoice might need two, three, or four approvers across developer, owner, and manager functions. Sage Intacct's own workflow tool wasn't built for it.
- Deep, bidirectional Sage Intacct integration — not just a surface sync, but full support for every dimension Aeon uses, including custom codes.
Without actionable approval notifications, invoices stalled. Out of roughly 500 processed each week, as many as 200 sat waiting for approval at any given time. Every alternative looked like a step backward — one vendor, recommended by Aeon's ERP partner, lost the deal within an hour of the first conversation.
We were going to go backwards — stuffing envelopes again, printing checks on our scanner. The time involved was just going to escalate dramatically, which was the wrong direction.
A System That Handled All Three Pieces
Aeon's evaluation came down to the three things most systems failed at least one of. ProcureDesk addressed all three:
- Sage Intacct integration depth — synced to all of Intacct's standard dimensions plus the custom user-defined dimension codes Aeon relies on. Something few competing tools could match.
- Location/entity capture — the ability to identify and route on Intacct's location dimension was a hard requirement. Most competing systems couldn't do it.
- Complex workflow configuration — ProcureDesk built and maintained multi-step, conditional approval workflows without requiring the Aeon team to do the setup themselves.
- White-glove implementation — the ProcureDesk team took the existing workflow design and built it in the system, with minimal back-and-forth required from Aeon.
- Speed to live — given the April go-live deadline, there was no margin for a slow ramp. ProcureDesk had workflows built and ready for testing within days.
Finding a system that accommodates those three big pieces cleanly — when we found ProcureDesk, it was like, oh my gosh, this is different from the other systems out there.
Quick Implementation With Ongoing Support
Aeon came in expecting the usual heavy lift of an AP system rollout. What they got instead:
- The implementation lead took Aeon's existing workflow design and built it directly in ProcureDesk — no heavy back-and-forth required from the Aeon team.
- Workflows were configured and ready for testing in what felt like days.
- Post-go-live support has continued: Sage Intacct dimension coverage has expanded based on Aeon's requests, with additional location features already in progress.
- Over a year later, the responsiveness that impressed them at implementation has continued — new features scoped and delivered in response to real operational needs.
Our implementation lead said, 'give it to me, I'll get it set up for you' — and it was ready for us to start looking at and testing. We're kind of looking at each other like, this is too good to be true.
Clear, Measurable Impact
Since going live, the most visible impact landed where Aeon least expected it — invoice approval throughput. Two additional highlights:
- Built-in AI assistant — reduced internal support questions. When the team needed to add a shipping location for a new entity, the answer came back in under two minutes.
- Team adoption — Greg's senior operations person, who manages day-to-day activity in ProcureDesk, has become one of its most enthusiastic advocates.
I would have to pry with a crowbar to get ProcureDesk out of our team's hands right now.
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