Unifi Aviation builds a fully automated and AI-powered procure-to-pay process

The Challenge

Before Zip, procure-to-pay wasn't really a concept at Unifi Aviation. Mark Hlavek, VP, Global Controller, describes the process he inherited when he joined the company: “The intake-to-pay process before Zip was fairly manual. We would get invoices in, they would be scanned in, they would be sent around for approval for the station managers at the local airports.” Those same station managers were also responsible for coding invoices to the right place in the general ledger before the Accounts Payable (AP) team could enter, process, and pay them.

This was especially hard on the people running Unifi's day-to-day airport operations. “As you can imagine, at an airport they're running operations all day, and having things that are manual processes and having somebody chasing them around for approvals is not something that they really have time for,” Mark says.

Payments carried their own friction, too. Rather than batching payments through a partner, Unifi processed and generated checks directly out of their own bank account for every invoice.

As Unifi nearly tripled in size over five years, the cracks in this manual approach became harder to ignore. “The main inflection point was realizing that we needed a full procure-to-pay business solution,” Mark adds. “As the business scaled, it became very important to have a fully automated system.”

The Solution

Unifi evaluated several options before selecting Zip. Many competing platforms require significant IT and tech-stack investments to implement. Zip, by contrast, fits Unifi's complexity.

Unifi also wanted a company willing to build alongside them. “The criteria really is the full automation of procure-to-pay, but also having a partner that understands your needs and is willing to listen to what you need and make enhancements along the way,” Mark says.

Unifi fully implemented Zip for the entire procure-to-pay process rather than stitching together point solutions. Mark shares, “as you start trying to bifurcate things or tasks or duties across multiple systems, it just becomes more complex, and it just opens yourself up to more potential for errors.”

“The new process was introduced to the business across the board,” says Mahonri Cruz, Senior Director of FinTech, who helped roll out documentation and training on the new process to roughly 300 station managers across the US, UK, and Ireland.

Today, Zip connects directly into Unifi's ERP system, NetSuite, syncing bill and coding data automatically, including custom workflows and fields for asset purchases. Invoices land in a central inbox, where Zip's Invoice Coding AI Agent reviews and sets them up before the AP team checks them for accuracy. From there, invoices are routed out for approval, either to a corporate approver or, if airport-related spend, directly to the station manager on the ground. Once approved, everything queues up in Zip and payments are batched and issued on Unifi's behalf.

The Invoice Coding Agent gets more accurate as more purchase orders flow through it. “What AI excels at is when you actually have a purchase order associated with your invoice, and then it will match that purchase order up to your invoice and process it for payment,” Mark says. Month over month, as it sees the same vendors and bills repeat, it keeps refining its coding. Coding patterns are applied consistently, reducing manual work and review for AP.

Unifi also extended Zip to indirect categories through its punchout marketplace, which covers office supplies, HR purchases, Amazon, Staples and many of their safety vendors. “We now have visibility on the spend through those vendors,” Mahonri shares. The Unifi team is currently working to integrate all vendors so that absolutely every category of spend will go through Zip.

The Results

Since building a full procure-to-pay process in Zip, Unifi's AP team has absorbed far more volume without adding headcount. “They've been the main beneficiary, and they've been able to improve intake by 96%,” Mark says, “and that's really all due to the functionality in the system and then us taking the time to optimize it after we launched it.”

That capacity proved critical during a recent acquisition that increased Unifi's AP intake by 40% overnight. “It was pretty seamless,” Mark says, “because we did a lot of the upfront thought around coding and getting that right, it allows them to be super efficient when they're taking on additional work.”

Coding accuracy and days payable outstanding have improved the most, driven largely by Zip's AI agent and Unifi's now-mandated “no PO, no pay” policy, with PO adoption at roughly 80% company-wide. “Once we move to POs and the more that AI gets in tune with our operations and sees repetitive bills that come through, the more accurate we get every month,” Mark says.

For the teams running Unifi's stations, approvals no longer require chasing down paperwork between flights. “It really helps the people that are on the ground have a way to do their approvals, without it being a major interruption to their day,” Mark says.

The visibility Zip provides has also changed how Unifi's Finance team supports the rest of the business. “In the Finance department, we are in constant need of data,” Mahonri says. “All that information is gold for us so we can do more things.” That data now flows directly into cash forecasting and leadership reporting. “We are able to provide more answers on how spending is going for the team.”

Procurement has benefited, too, using consolidated, company-wide spend data to negotiate more effectively with vendors. “It really allows you to report on your total spend by vendor and manage those kinds of vendor negotiations based on cumulative spend,” Mark shares.

Looking ahead, Unifi plans to build on its procure-to-pay foundation by leveraging more of Zip's capabilities to support month-end close, including more accurate accruals and better visibility into requests that have been submitted but not yet approved or posted. Reflecting on the shift, Marks says, “Zip has really allowed us to get to that state of having a true procure-to-pay process. That's where we've really gotten the most benefit out of the system.”