How Intrepid Labs cut bookkeeping costs with AI
A finance team of one semi-automated accounts payable in Slack, QuickBooks Online and Float, with Ryan approving payments.
Ryan Evans
Intrepid Labs
Up to 50%
Annual reduction in external bookkeeping costs
0 invoices
Manually entered into the ERP
Human approval
Ryan reviews and schedules payments in Float
About Ryan
Ryan Evans runs finance as a team of one at Intrepid Labs. He owns everything the money touches — accounts payable, the approval process, the ERP, the corporate card program, and the reporting on top of all of it.
More invoices meant a bigger bookkeeping bill
At Intrepid Labs, accounts payable ran through an external bookkeeper.
Invoices arrived across scattered mailboxes. Ryan collected them and submitted them. The bookkeeper entered them into the AP software. There was no payment schedule, so timing was managed by memory and follow-up. And as the business grew, so did the invoice count — and the invoice count is what the arrangement was priced on.
Their annual spend went up by 50%.
“The external bookkeeper dropped a 50% increase on us with 7 days notice so I started looking at automated solutions to get our costs down.”
The price scaled with volume, not with value. More invoices meant a bigger invoice. Ryan was paying an increasing amount for rules-based entry that never required judgment in the first place.
The handoff was the failure point. Ryan submitted on time. The invoices still occasionally didn't make it into the AP software. He'd done his part correctly and the outcome was still wrong, which meant he had to check the work anyway — and checking every submission is most of the work of doing it.
Nothing upstream got fixed. Receipts stayed scattered, payments stayed unscheduled, things still got missed. The bookkeeper sat at the end of a leaky pipeline rather than closing the leaks.
Accounts payable in the tools Ryan already uses
Instead of sending the routine work to a person outside the company, Billow runs it inside the tools Ryan's team already lives in.
Billow gives finance teams agents: AI employees purpose-built for finance and accounting work, pre-trained on the concepts and already fluent in how the work is done.
Billow learns your AP process, then runs it
Billow interviews you. Every company approves spend differently. Billow asks what it needs to know — the procurement policy, the thresholds, who signs off on what.
Billow generates a workflow. Invoices arrive by email or by voice and route to the Billow agent in Slack. The agent knows the approval rules and pulls in the right approver in the channel, where the approval happens directly.
Billow runs automatically. Approved invoices post to QuickBooks Online through the API and land in the ERP without anyone typing them. In parallel, the finance inbox connects to Billow and invoices forward into Float for payment.
Billow asks for approval. Ryan reviews in Float, adds banking details for any first-time vendor, confirms the approval, and schedules the payment. The money never moves without him.
Integrates with the tools finance teams already use
Slack, QuickBooks Online, and Float — all systems Intrepid Labs already ran. Nothing migrated, nobody learned new software, and the approvers never left the channel they were already in. The connections are what make it repeatable: set up once, and every invoice after that follows the same path on its own.
“The first time an invoice went from an email to approved in Slack to sitting in QuickBooks without me touching it, that was the whole pitch delivered in about four minutes.”
Less manual entry, lower bookkeeping costs
Accounts payable at Intrepid Labs now runs end to end without manual entry, and the external bookkeeping engagement came down with it.
The AP workflow was the starting point, not the ceiling. Billow is expanding into the rest of the finance function at Intrepid Labs — the corporate card program, expense handling, and month-end close are all built from the same pieces: an agent that learns the policy, connects to the systems already in place, and runs on its own with Ryan approving.
“I thought automating this process would be very easy but it turns out there are an incredible amount of edge cases, different scenarios and permissions in our procurement policy that increase complexity. The Billow team was very responsive and showed a high level of dedication to ensuring that our AP Agent works properly.”