Lights, Camera, Automation: How Cinespace Studios Streamlined AP for Global Growth

Cinespace Studios Streamlines Global AP and Gains Control to Power Rapid Growth with ExFlow AP

From the legacy of historic family run studios, Cinespace’s new leadership is moving the organization into the next stage of global production – to serve the rapid expansion of the entire content industry.  This expansion necessitated innovation in the Procure-to-Pay operations and implementation of ExFlow from SignUp Software, alongside their Partner, Admiral Consulting Group.

Executive Summary

Procure to Pay operations – especially Accounts payable processing – is prone to complexity and inefficient manual processes, particularly when companies have multiple approval processes, use outdated systems, and experience unexpected growth and change.

Cinespace Studios, a global film studio network, was struggling to manage over 10,000 invoices a year following a change of ownership and a new growth plan. As existing processes buckled under the weight of invoice processing, company finance leaders decided it was time for a change.  Cinespace Studios turned to SignUp Software and its ExFlow offering to transform accounts payable processing. Working with Admiral Consulting Group, Cinespace managed to overcome technical challenges, implement a new system rapidly, and achieve efficiency that had previously seemed out of reach.

About Cinespace Studios

Cinespace Studios is a group of film studio facilities with global presence with hubs in Chicago, Toronto, and Atlanta – supporting major productions like Stranger Things, The Bear, Black Panther, John Wick, The Handmaid’s Tale & more. Currently, it has 109 active stages spanning 4.3 million square feet of production space. Founded in 1988, Cinespace has grown rapidly, expanding through acquisitions, requiring stronger financial controls and scalable operations.

The Challenge

For years, Cinespace was a family-owned business that operated as two different companies with the same name in Chicago and Toronto. In 2022, TPG Real Estate, a private equity fund, purchased Cinespace. In late 2023, Cinespace acquired three new entities, resulting in a rapid increase in its AP workload. At around the same time, Cinespace also adopted Dynamics 365 Business Central.

As it grew, Cinespace wanted to improve efficiency across the board. But there were big problems for the finance team given the rapid expansion. To approve invoices, the centralized AP team needed to gather hand signatures and manually key the documents into Business Central. Systems, including their initial setup of Business Central, did not integrate well with one another.

For newly appointed Corporate Controller Sasha Johnson, Business Central seemed like a good place to start improving AP processes. Initially, Cinespace used Business Central to check for duplicates. However, the AP team still needed to get manual approvals and manually input every invoice.

“Sometimes we had to send invoices back to same manager to approve because the approval never made its way to the AP team,” Johnson explained. “There are better things to do than approving the same invoice five times! It would delay when payments process for that vendor and could result in vendor relations issues.”

The Search

Faced with mounting AP challenges, Johnson teamed up with Jacob Wolfe, Cinespace’s Director of IT, to begin searching for a new solution. They decided to prioritize one system to work with purchase orders and invoices, rather than have separate processes for invoices and purchase orders.

“Our requirements list wasn’t all that complex. The main goal was maintaining a smooth process throughout,” Wolfe recalled. “Many organizations have a buying organization and accounts payable processes that are split. We wanted a holistic procure-pay solution that would work for procurement and AP thereafter. Additionally, we were hoping for a solution that would automate the coding for us and all of the routing.”

Wolfe also acknowledged that the company’s approval rules were complex for their size. They have many ways to route based on different metadata tags, and they needed the new solution to integrate with the custom fields they had added to Business Central.

“As much as we could, we wanted to simplify the user experience so that we would have ease of use rather than two or three different systems,” he added.

Initially, Cinespace looked at three or four different solutions on its short list. The company interviewed approvers, considered vendors with plug-and-play integrations with Business Central, and tried to avoid a solution that would require building a custom integration.

Wolfe and Johnson brought the entire AP team to demos to ask questions and get buy-in. Among the software vendors Cinespace spoke with, drawn from a list of leaders on Gartner’s Magic Quadrant, it found that many contenders do not handle purchase orders, treating them as procurement, not payables.

“It came down to us choosing between ExFlow and a purpose-built AP tool with a much flashier UI. Ultimately, we chose ExFlow because of seamlessness with BC and the fact that it had a lot of the benefits of a purpose-built solution,” Wolfe said.

The Solution: Implementation and Rollout

Once Cinespace chose ExFlow it teamed up with a skilled Microsoft partner, Admiral Consulting Group, to achieve its desired implementation and rollout.

Ben Lane, Admiral Client Success Manager, recalled his initial discussions with the Cinespace team around automation. “Our first recommendation whenever anyone inquires about AP automation is SignUp Software’s ExFlow,” Lane said. “It consistently delivers excellent demos. They’re always very responsive with a very knowledgeable and experienced team there. Between our team and our existing relationship with Cinespace, and our trust in SignUp Software, it created a great level of comfort level in being able to trust SignUp to communicate with Jacob.”

According to Lane, the implementation was unusual for its degree of complexity, with 10,000+ invoices a year across multiple entities (and growing). They wanted a robust, automated solution that worked with Business Central. But to achieve that, they would need to modify standard processes and behavior to meet their needs.

“One standout was rapid customizations to ExFlow and the initial portal…Working closely with Jacob we determined which pages and tables need to be exposed and related to in the background,” Lane explained. “We made decisions to define editable or not-editable fields. Between our development team, which is very experienced, and ExFlow’s team, which is also very experienced, we defined and developed the right flow of invoices to the approvals portal and to the back end to Business Central.”

Along with enhanced automation and invoice approvals, Cinespace was able to leverage ExFlow’s streamlined exception handling. The labor cost and time per approval steadily improved. ExFlow provided built-in controls, approval hierarchies, document capture, and optical character recognition to spot potential fraud.

In the lead up to rollout, Johnson and Wolfe led testing with the AP team to identify issues. “Konnie [from the ExFlow team] was awesome and helped us with everything…Our rollout went pretty smoothly. We had nothing but positive feedback from approvers and from the AP team,” Johnson said.

Cinespace needed comparatively few customizations, besides the custom fields in Business Central.

Results & Impact: Achieving AP Success

Once the implementation was complete, the Cinespace team saw immediate improvements across their Procure-to-Pay process. The efficiency gains have enabled the AP team to both save time and boost consistency. Johnson offered an example of how automation improved performance in the Chicago office, where she works.

“We have property tax invoices to pay. Our Chicago location has over 50 property tax bills to pay twice a year. The AP person processed a couple overnight. [The AP person then ran a batch job process overnight, which learned the process, resulting in other bills being processed much more rapidly]. It’s helped her because she doesn’t have to manually code them. Now, they all get coded the same way. That’s the feedback I get on how time is saved. It gives time to do other things like projects and has really streamlined the whole AP processing.”

Before implementing ExFlow, Cinespace already had internal controls in place for fraud prevention. ExFlow worked within the existing parameters and processes to enhance controls further, like by providing additional validation and more regular update emails to expedite approvals.

On the backend, it has had a “huge impact” eliminating the need to approve the same invoice multiple times, Wolfe said. Johnson added:

“For me as an approver, I’m loving it. Previously it would come through our Teams account with each individual approval, maybe 10 a day and I’d have to open each one with a BC session in a browser. I had to open a unique session of BC, download the document, then compare it to BC to make sure it was coded correctly, then go back to Teams to approve it. All told, it would then take 30 minutes to process. Now we have only one dashboard for every company to forward or include other people not in the approval process. Putting it in one central location is so transparent for AP.”

Looking Ahead

“It also gives us a lot more flexibility than before with approvals going to one person,” Johnson said. “For invoice approvals in the past there was no way to systematically share them. Now we can tag the invoice with a comment or forward it.”

Cinespace sees as ExFlow as an asset for their long-term scalability plans. For example, after purchasing a company in Germany, Cinespace was able to integrate with its new subsidiary, achieving a standardized global AP system.

The solution also offers the company options to add future AI and machine learning capabilities. ExFlow can be connected with Blob storage, CoPilot, and Azure AI.

“The more we’ve worked with ExFlow and discussed with the ExFlow team about their future vision, it’s very reassuring, inspiring, and motivational to see the direction of their continued efforts,” Lane said.

Lane sees the Cinespace project as an example of successful early alignment between stakeholders and decisionmakers. The result was a streamlined implementation from start to finish, with a clear understanding of where the company would go in phase two.

“Time efficiency is one of the biggest benefits I see for a business using ExFlow,” Wolfe said. “Saving time on manual data entry allows us to expand on our projects. Having more time to analyze the data they’re receiving and ask insightful and valuable questions, spot issues, and call them out helps AP teams and takes AP to another level. In the middle market, these capabilities are rare to see. It’s priced in a way that SMBs can afford it and really elevates AP staff to help draw more insights from data they’re processing.”