Dave Anstey
Director of Business Development and Partner Relations
Over the years I’ve spent working with Unit4 Financials by Coda customers, some things play on repeat. This is definitely the case when you ask a finance director where the pain sits in their accounts payable process, and almost none of them point at Coda itself. They point at everything upstream of it: the PDF invoices sitting in a shared inbox, the matching done from memory, the approval chasing over email, the spreadsheet someone maintains “just to keep track of what’s coming.”
Coda does what it was built to do. It’s a reliable, real-time ledger that finance teams globally trust precisely because it doesn’t try to be everything. But that focus means the work of getting an invoice into Coda cleanly has, for a lot of organisations, been left to manual effort. And manual effort doesn’t necessarily scale when invoice volumes climb into the thousands a month.
Where the hours actually go
We see the same AP efficiency drains come up again and again in conversations with Coda customers:
- Keying invoice data by hand from PDFs or paper, invoice by invoice.
- Matching invoices to purchase orders and receipts manually, often after the invoice has already reached someone’s approval queue.
- Chasing approvals through inboxes with no visibility into where something has stalled.
- Reporting on committed spend from data that’s already a week or two out of date by the time anyone looks at it.
These all reflect the reality that AP automation and spend management are a different discipline to core financial management, and many Coda deployments have never had a proper answer for that layer sitting in front of the ledger.
Why we partnered with ISPnext
This is the challenge we set out to solve and that led us into a new strategic partnership. LEVEL8 can now deliver a full integration between Unit4 Financials by Coda and ISPnext, a Business Spend Management platform already relied on by more than 450 organisations across their source-to-pay process.
The logic is straightforward. Let Coda keep doing what it does best as your financial core, and deploy ISPnext to take on the spend management work around it. Their solution drives invoice capture, PO matching, approval workflow, and spend visibility. So, rather than asking finance teams to bolt on individual solutions or build workarounds, this new integration means invoices are captured and matched in ISPnext, then post straight through into Coda once approved, with no re-keying and nothing to reconcile between two systems.
For Coda customers, that turns AP from a manual, backward-looking process into something closer to real time: touchless invoice processing, matching that happens before approval rather than after, approvals that move based on automated routing, and a live view of committed versus actual spend that finance can actually plan against.
What this means in practice
We see this integration as an extension of what Coda customers can expect from their finance solution. The organisations that get the most value tend to be the ones already feeling the strain of manual matching and approval chasing, particularly where spend visibility has become a focus at board-level, rather than just amongst the finance team.
If accounts payable is still eating a disproportionate share of your team’s time each week, or your view of committed spend is always a step behind reality, then let’s have a conversation. LEVEL8’s specialist software development team have put the work in to the integration build, testing, and the support for Coda environments. So, from here, the work is in understanding what your invoice flow looks like today and where the automation delivers the fastest return.
