Overview

Westbury Street Holdings (WSH) is one of the UK's largest independent food and hospitality services providers. The company runs chef-led operations in over 4,000 locations across the UK and Europe, from school dining rooms to landmark locations, such as the Louvre in Paris. As WSH expanded through acquisitions, however, its finance team faced a manual AP operation that could no longer scale. E-invoicing was impractical due to their suppliers’ lack of technical acumen and the low frequency of invoice submissions, forcing site managers to manually process invoices from tail suppliers. The home office only managed non-location invoices and suppliers that individual sites are unable to handle, involving areas such as overhead and support costs.

WSH deployed AppZen's Autonomous AP and AP Inbox Service Center to automate the processing of invoices from inbox to payment. Within three months, processing time dropped 38%, and the autonomous invoice processing rate grew 2.4x. More importantly, chefs were able to get out of the back office and return to focusing on food services and customer engagement.

Problem

When growth outpaces your AP infrastructure

WSH manages accounting for more than 20 subsidiary businesses within 7 countries, across 5 currencies. Each operates independently, with its own processes and intercompany transactions. Every new acquisition added complexity that the finance team had to absorb manually, across a group processing nearly £2 billion annually.

For Colin Yates, UK and Ireland Financial Controller at WSH, the daily friction was significant. Invoices outside WSH's standard food purchasing model required manual GL coding, adding repetitive effort and increasing the risk of inconsistency across entities. Accessing invoice data meant logging in and out of multiple GL portals depending on the business or entity. Documents were scattered across folders without version control or audit trails.

Supplier communication compounded the problem. All inbound queries were routed through a shared inbox with no established ownership or resolution tracking. As volumes grew, visibility collapsed. Duplicate work, missed follow-ups, and inconsistent responses became routine.

In addition, staff leads at each site were processing invoices as part of their roles. This gave each site direct control and accountability for supplier costs, but took catering staff away from their primary focus of serving the customer. The company needed a more efficient processing model that supported scalable growth while maintaining that devolved accountability.

We have nearly 4,000 locations where people are running a catering service, and whilst we want our locations to retain accountability for their costs, they’re also manually processing AP invoices, which reduces the time spent preparing and serving fresh, nutritious meals to their customers. We don’t want them to do that in the future.

 

Colin Yates

UK and Ireland Financial Controller, Westbury Street Holdings

Solution

One system for invoices, supplier communication, and supporting documents

Colin needed a solution that could absorb growing invoice volumes without additional headcount and bring consistency to fragmented entities. The criteria were clear: automate invoice intake and classification, manage supplier communication, and improve over time.

The team deployed AppZen’s Autonomous AP with AP Inbox Service Center, addressing each failure point in WSH’s manual process:

A centralized workspace for all invoice activity

Invoices, supplier communications, and supporting documents became accessible in a single system, eliminating the need to move between GL portals.

A complete audit trail for every invoice

Every step of the invoice journey was recorded, whether actioned by automation or manually, creating a clear record for compliance and review.

A shift from manual processing to higher-value work

Automated intake, classification, and routing reduced invoice handling time, freeing AP staff for exception management and supplier relationship work. 

As a business, we’re growing, and we want to be able to adapt and react to that growth, take on extra volume, and have a solution like AppZen manage that for us.

 

Colin Yates

UK and Ireland Financial Controller, Westbury Street Holdings

Result

38% faster invoice processing and a finance team focused on what matters

WSH started with its most complex processes to validate AppZen’s capability before removing manual review. That deliberate approach accelerated confidence and brought about results.

Within three months:

  • Invoice processing time decreased by 38%

  • The autonomous processing rate grew 2.4x, reducing manual touchpoints across the board

  • Average invoice review time fell to 2.3 minutes

  • The swivel-chair practice of moving between GL portals was eliminated, with every document accessible directly within AppZen

The AP inbox results were equally significant. In the first four months, AppZen labeled all 3,400 incoming emails, automatically categorizing each as an invoice, statement document, or payment inquiry. Of those, 215 emails received a predicted response, an early signal of growing autonomous capability. Suspicious domains and urgent-language emails were flagged early, and every inquiry became visible, trackable, and tied to the full invoice journey. In that same period, £774K in duplicate invoices was flagged and prevented from payment, and the team recovered an estimated 89 hours of manual work.

This improvement in processing time delivered three major benefits. First, it freed the finance team to focus on more value-added activities, such as resolving supplier disputes. Second, it supports the higher volumes that accompany growth without requiring additional headcount. And third, with AppZen handling invoice processing at the site level, catering staff can return to the kitchen and counters and focus on what they do best: preparing and serving fresh, nutritious food for their customers.

AppZen provides an audit trail. You can see the original email and each part of the invoice, whether it’s been actioned by automation or manually. From a controls perspective, we’ve got a strong audit trail.

 

Colin Yates
UK and Ireland Financial Controller, Westbury Street Holdings

What's next?

How WSH is scaling autonomous AP to new business units

WSH plans to expand AppZen across additional business units, increasing transaction volume and improving autonomous rates through targeted configuration and data quality work. The team will systematically identify where invoices still require manual touchpoints and work to eliminate them.

New AI Agents will be introduced for VAT management, invoice data extraction, and supplier response handling, reducing manual follow-up and improving speed across the invoice lifecycle.

WSH entered the engagement with a clear mandate to deliver on complex processes first. AppZen got them to the goal. What began as a fix for a fragmented AP operation is now the foundation for a finance function built to scale with the business.