Where does invoice processing lose time?
Between arrival and approval. Invoices come in from merchants, hire companies and subcontractors, and then wait for a project manager who is on a site with no intention of opening a filing tray. Meanwhile the job cost in Workbench is missing committed cost that has already been incurred. Vergo compresses that gap by capturing the invoice on arrival and putting the approval on the manager's phone.
How does Vergo connect to Workbench?
The Workbench API sits in the customer's own environment — the contractor's IT team enables access once and Vergo handles the mapping and ongoing connection from there. Workbench publishes its service reference at its Swagger endpoint. Because access is customer-provisioned rather than partner-gated, there is no vendor approval queue between signing up and being connected.
How is invoice coding handled?
Vergo reads the invoice line by line and proposes a job and cost centre based on the supplier and the job's history. The approver confirms or corrects, and the bill posts into Workbench complete. No placeholder entries, no reclassification exercise at the end of the month.
How does approval routing work?
By job, to the manager who owns it, with thresholds escalating larger invoices for a second approval. Rejections carry a reason and return to accounts immediately, so a query is resolved before the supplier phones about payment. Every approval is timestamped and attached to the invoice, which is what makes a claim or a variation dispute defensible months later.
What happens with subcontractor claims?
Subcontractor billing carries retentions, progress claims against a schedule of value, and compliance documents that need to be current. Vergo holds an invoice as an exception when the expected document is missing or expired, so the control applies before payment rather than during a dispute.
Does cutting invoice volume beat processing it faster?
Usually both are worth doing, but volume first. A meaningful slice of what accounts processes is low-value buying that went on account because nobody had a controlled card. Vergo issues those cards with limits by amount and merchant category, which moves routine purchases off the invoice queue entirely.
What changes at month end?
Committed cost in Workbench reflects what has actually been incurred, accruals come from invoices already captured and coded, and the accounts team spends the first week reviewing rather than keying a backlog.
How are supplier queries answered?
From the record rather than from memory. Every invoice carries its arrival date, its coding, who approved it and when, and its payment status, so a supplier asking where their payment sits gets an answer in a minute. The same history answers the internal version of the question — a project manager asking why a job's cost moved can see the invoice that moved it and the approval behind it.
What does the accounts team have to set up?
The job and cost centre mapping, the approval thresholds by amount, and the list of managers who own each job. Duplicate detection, supplier matching and exception rules run on that structure without further configuration. Most contractors run a fortnight in parallel with their existing process, compare what posts into Workbench against what they would have keyed, and then switch over.
Do approved invoices post into Workbench?
Yes. Vergo posts approved bills into Workbench with their job and cost centre coding and full approval history attached.
Can project managers approve invoices from site?
Yes. Invoices route by job to the responsible manager, who approves or rejects from their phone or email with a reason recorded.
How are subcontractor compliance documents managed?
Invoices are held as exceptions when a required compliance document is missing or out of date, so the issue is caught before payment.
What does our IT team need to do?
Enable API access to the contractor's Workbench environment once. Vergo handles the mapping and the ongoing connection after that.
