Define
In accounting, Accounts Payable (AP) is how a business manages and pays the money it owes vendors and suppliers: reviewing each bill, approving it, paying it on time, and recording it correctly.
Traditionally manual and error-prone, AP creates real operational risk and cost for finance teams. AP Automation software speeds this up and cuts down on mistakes, replacing spreadsheets, paper checks, and bank portals with a single workflow.
Overview
NetSuite’s AP Automation has long reduced manual effort, but setup remained cumbersome and the experience felt fragmented, leaving users without confidence in the payment process. A new partnership with BILL.com, which handles the secure payment processing layer, meant users had to step outside NetSuite to complete certain payment actions, deepening that fragmentation at a critical moment in the workflow.
Building this integration from scratch was an opportunity to rethink the full AP experience: absorbing BILL.com into the workflow without disrupting the user’s sense of place or control. Intelligent Payment Automation launched in 2025 as the successor to AP Automation and debuted at SuiteWorld 2025 as a flagship AI initiative.
Solution
We launched Intelligent Payment Automation, delivering a fully NetSuite-integrated experience that supports users throughout the payment journey. With a guided experience, Intelligent Payment Automation introduces a structured workflow with contextual guidance, clearer system status, and improved dashboard-level visibility into payment activity. The goal is not just to help users complete AP tasks, but also to help them understand where they are in the process, what needs attention, and how to take the next step.
Intelligent Payment Automation simplifies payments, provides real-time visibility into outgoing cash, and enables faster adoption through self-service onboarding. The result: tighter control of outgoing cash and scalable, end-to-end AP, which allows users to complete their accounting tasks and, in turn, trust NetSuite.
Get Started
Configure the product and complete initial account setup.
Prepare Payment
Payment clerk prepares vendor and payment data for processing.
Review and Pay
Manager reviews and approves activity. Initiate payments.
Track and Resolve
CEOs monitor payment status and manage expectations efficiently.
Intelligent Payment Automation was launched at SuiteWorld 2025 as a flagship AI initiative. See the official NetSuite product guide and demo below!
Problem
While NetSuite AP Automation was a crucial product of customers, it had crucial issues that made the payment process. Here were the three biggest pain points from users that we aimed to solve.
Fragmented payment process
Experience spread throughout the system and even to other non-NetSuite applications
The current AP Automation experience is not only difficult to set up, but also feels not fully integrated into NetSuite, which makes it harder for users to complete payment tasks with confidence. With these issues combined, the payment system that was difficult to trust and even harder to scale.
In light of a new BILL.com partner integration, we were presented the opportunity to redesign the full AP experience to build a truly user-friendly product.
Different persona needs
Holds legal signing authority. Watches over the process, but only engages in high-level management.
Manages approval routing, verification and payment run oversight instead of signing. Signs off on payment clerk activities.
Handles day-to-day activity, vendor and bank details, then hands off the sign off and final payment to payment manager or CEO.
These three roles rarely belong to one person, but they almost always overlap in terms of tasks.
Intelligent Payment Automation’s onboarding was designed so any of them can start setup, while routing the one step that carries legal weight, signing, to whoever actually has the authority to take it, so payment automation isn’t blocked by asking the wrong person to sign.
After setup, the day-to-day tasks are mostly managed by the payment clerk, but verification and account management needs to be handed off to paymetn manager and CEO.
Key Features
Persona permission boundaries
Different personas needed different access at different points in the flow, and work had to hand off between them.
One example: only the CEO could sign the BILL.com agreement IPA depends on, so the CEO signs first, then hands off to a Manager or Clerk to finish configuring accounts, approvals, and vendors.
Accounting for permissions
Dashboard system
AP work spans dozens of bills, accounts, and approvals at once, useless if scattered across separate screens.
A dashboard brings balances, account status, and recommended actions into one place, so users see what needs attention without digging through the rest of NetSuite.
Main dashboard homepage
Status indicators
Every step in an AP workflow, from a bill's due date to a signature's state, needs to communicate where things currently stand.
Status indicators like "Signed," "Due in 1 day," and "Email sent" give users a persistent, at-a-glance answer, so they never have to open a screen just to check if something's done.
Badge, icons, and other status indicators
Unhappy paths
Things break: a bank connection fails, a document doesn't sign, a step depends on someone else finishing theirs first.
I led design for these cases, matching the message to the screen, some needed persistent messaging, others a one-time note, so a single failure never stalled the process or left users searching for help elsewhere.
Banner system to communicate errors
Designs across two brands
Part of this flow wasn't ours to fully own. BILL.com handled payment processing, meaning we designed around a second company's branding wherever their screens entered the experience.
We used their logo within their guidelines and ran a dedicated review of every component we utilized, checking it matched what they'd approved.
BILL.com logo
Pre-launch
Reviews with leadership
The design team collaborated with product to demo various high-impact flows to leadership. We hosted three review sessions, presenting to Senior VP and even the CEO.
Leading quality assurance
I led the final QA pass, working closely with a visual designer to check that components, branding, and overall UI matched spec before launch. That meant documenting every discrepancy, prioritizing which ones actually mattered, and presenting the list to the development team for resolution before ship.
QA annotations
Concrete increase in efficiency
Early adopters express a positive experience with Intelligent Payment Automation, driven by named improvements: time saved over manual checks, smoother approvals, better cash-flow control.
Self-sufficient adoption
Majority of early adopters interviewed run the entire payment run themselves, unassisted: a strong trust signal in finance software.
High-conviction quotes
"It's light years better than what I would have been doing otherwise" and "I'm more excited about this release than NetSuite's put out in the last five years," both from CFOs.
Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ recognition
We delivered future-focused designs that contributed to Oracle NetSuite being named a Leader in two 2025 Gartner Magic Quadrant reports for Cloud ERP.
My main contributions
Collaboration with Design Team
I collaborated closely with a designer and visual designer, dividing ownership across Intelligent Payment Automation’s surfaces. Through regular critiques and alignment sessions, I ensured our work cohesively met product goals and adhered to the NetSuite design system.
Managing Consistency
Intelligent Payment Automation spanned 100+ Figma screens across a high-visibility, leadership-facing deliverable. I took ownership of design consistency, which included auditing and enforcing fonts, colors, components, and spacing to ensure every screen was pixel-perfect and presentation-ready.
Conducting Design Quality Assurance
Before launch, I led a full design QA audit of the engineering team’s implementation, identifying UI and experience gaps against the design spec. I built and maintained a dedicated tracking system to manage fixes, helping drive a quality, on-spec product release.
Working on a project this complex and high-stakes was no easy feat, but navigating its many moving parts taught me a lot. Collaborating closely with developers, product managers, SMEs, the BILL.com team, and legal pushed me to work through ambiguity while also respecting strict constraints. Most importantly, it sharpened my ability to advocate for the user and push for the best possible experience, even when the path forward wasn’t always clear.