Somewhere right now, someone in finance is logging into their fourteenth vendor portal of the day, copying a username and password out of a spreadsheet called something like “passwords_final_version3,” and downloading an invoice by hand. Then they do it again. And again.
On the latest episode of ExtropyOnAIR, Extropy CEO Ravit Gutman and Mike Jasper talked through why that work exists in the first place, what it actually costs, and how SmartFetch, the tool Extropy built with its clients, gets rid of it.
The part of AP that never makes it onto the roadmap
Every AP automation demo covers the same ground: an invoice arrives, gets captured, routed, coded, and paid. What almost never comes up is how the invoice got into the system to begin with.
For a lot of AP teams, a meaningful share of invoices don’t arrive by email or EDI. They live behind a login screen, one portal per vendor, and someone has to manually sign in and download each one before any automation can start working on it.
“Users are going in, grabbing the username, copying the password, logging into the portal, finding the invoice, downloading it, logging out, going on to the next one. Times that by dozens or hundreds of times they have to do this.” – Mike Jasper
It’s not a technical problem so much as an organizational blind spot. Because it happens before the “automated” part of the process begins, it never lands on anyone’s roadmap. It just becomes someone’s recurring job.
And the stakes are higher than a wasted afternoon. Behind each of those invoices is a shutoff deadline.
“If they miss one of these, a building can go dark, a shipment can be held up, internet goes out. There’s real consequences to any gap in this manual work.” – Mike Jasper
As Ravit put it, that’s the part of this problem no one talks about: it’s not just busywork, it’s the work that literally keeps the lights on.
What SmartFetch actually does
In plain terms: SmartFetch is an AI agent that goes and gets your invoices for you. Utility bills, telecom, government portals, shipping partners, it collects them all and delivers them straight into your payment system the moment they post, no login required from your team.
Mike’s analogy for it: think of SmartFetch as a personal mail robot. It knows every mailbox you have to check, it checks them every morning, and it stacks the important mail neatly on your desk, already labeled, before you’ve had your coffee.
Setting it up doesn’t require IT. A user answers three questions, where to pull invoices from, how to send them, and how often to check, and SmartFetch takes it from there, attaching account number, amount, and bill date to every invoice automatically.
A real client story
SmartFetch came out of a specific problem Extropy saw with a healthcare client running over 200 locations. Every month, someone in finance had to log into a single utility portal and manually download 200 invoices, one supplier, one login, 200 downloads, then key each one in and upload it before it could even be processed. That was one supplier out of many.
The invoices didn’t all land on the same day, either. Someone had to check that portal every day, because the 200 invoices posted on a rolling basis across locations. The team kept a manual spreadsheet just to track what had already been downloaded, and human error crept in anyway. Missed invoices meant late fees and disconnect notices.
“There’s always human error when you look at something like that. So there’s always the risk that the invoice was missed and they had late fees or disconnect notices being sent.” – Mike Jasper
That’s the fire drill SmartFetch was built to end: every invoice captured automatically the day it posts, no portal marathon, no manual entry, and no late payments from a missed login.
Myth vs. fact
Ravit and Mike ran through some of the most common assumptions about how SmartFetch works.
Myth: SmartFetch dumps all your portal passwords into a spreadsheet somewhere.
Fact is the opposite. Credentials are stored securely in one place, and users never see or copy the underlying username and password. “It’s actually the exact opposite. SmartFetch kills the shared password spreadsheet,” Mike said.
Myth: Running SmartFetch against vendor portals will get an account locked out.
This is a fair fear, since some older RPA-style tools did trigger exactly that by hammering a portal repeatedly. SmartFetch uses a single, controlled login per check, only reads and downloads, and never touches portal settings, so it doesn’t trip the security alarms that flag an automated attack.
Myth (actually a fact): One SmartFetch login can pull invoices from hundreds of accounts.
A team can log into SmartFetch with a single set of credentials, and SmartFetch handles secure access across hundreds of vendor portals from there, without exposing individual portal passwords to the people using it.
Myth: If a fetch fails quietly, you won’t find out until a bill goes unpaid.
SmartFetch sends a daily digest showing what worked and flagging anything that needs attention, so issues surface immediately instead of showing up as a missed payment.
Fact: SmartFetch shows you exactly how much time it’s saving, every day.
The same daily digest quantifies time saved in minutes and hours, based on invoice volume and each client’s own manual-process baseline.
Beyond AP
Mike noted the same pattern shows up well past AP: order-to-cash teams juggling 50 to 100 purchase orders a day across supplier portals like Ariba and Coupa face the identical manual bottleneck, just from the other side of the transaction. Any team with a recurring login-and-download routine, proof of delivery, purchase order confirmations, ancillary shipping documents, is a candidate for the same fix.
The takeaway
Every team has that one spreadsheet and that one person who’s quietly been doing this work for years without anyone naming it as a problem. Mike summed up SmartFetch in three words: “invoices fetched automatically.” The biggest misconception, he said, is that it takes IT involvement or a heavy project to set up. It doesn’t. It’s something a user can configure in about five minutes.
If this sounds familiar, the questions worth asking honestly: how many vendor portals does someone on your team log into every billing cycle, and has anyone actually measured what that adds up to in hours per month? For most teams that haven’t looked, the number is bigger than expected.
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