Nielsen Cuts Invoice Costs by 65% Across 38 Countries

Nielsen is a global audience measurement, data and analytics company. Neil now runs its accounts payable across 38 countries, covering 28 currencies and 5,000 vendors, in place of a legacy orchestration layer. The company wanted a standardized, compliant, future-ready AP model that works the same way in every country, and built it by implementing Neil’s AP Workbench.

The Challenge

Straight-through processing was effectively zero. Extraction accuracy was low and validation took heavy manual effort, on complex multi-line PO and non-PO invoices with VAT, WHT and discount processing on top. Every time volume or the number of countries grew, keeping validation consistent meant more manual work, so scale had become a structural constraint, not a technical one. The turning point came when the company stopped adding rules and decided to replace the orchestration layer entirely with an agentic intelligence layer.

The Solution

Neil’s AP Workbench took the place of the legacy orchestration layer. It ingests invoices from email and shared folders, applies up to 28 validation rules, including automated matching of purchase orders, goods receipts and invoices, and assigns GL codes using historical logic. Invoices route to approvers with reminders, and posting to SAP carries status tracking. The company also gets GenAI-based vendor query handling and dashboards for both operations and management.