Jyothy Labs is one of India’s most recognised home and personal care companies, with a portfolio of household brands including Ujala, Henko, Exo, Margo, Pril, and Maxo that have earned deep consumer trust across decades of distribution. With a presence in fabric care, dishwashing, surface cleaning, mosquito repellents, and personal care, Jyothy Labs operates at a scale that demands robust, reliable back-office infrastructure to match the ambition of its front-end commercial operations.
Managing accounts payable at a company like Jyothy Labs means processing a high and continuous volume of invoices across a large vendor base, multiple product categories, and several internal teams with their own approval responsibilities. When that process runs well, vendors are paid on time, compliance is maintained, and the finance team can focus on work that moves the business forward. When it doesn’t, the consequences accumulate quietly until they become impossible to ignore.
For Jyothy Labs, the invoice processing and approvals workflow had developed a set of structural inefficiencies that were slowing the operation down and creating visibility gaps the team could not easily manage around. The decision to bring in Finifi was a decision to fix the process at its foundation rather than continue working around its limitations.
250+ hours/month
Time previously consumed by manual invoice review, silent error detection and correction and reconciliation rework has been fully reclaimed.
2x faster invoice cycle times
From ingestion to SAP posting, AI-led validation, mobile approvals, and automated posting have removed the manual steps
85% reduction in manual effort
High-accuracy AI ingestion with field-level validation and clear exception flagging has eliminated the vast majority of silent errors.
The Problem: When invoice approvals run on email, everything slows down
Invoice processing at Jyothy Labs was being coordinated across email threads and teams in a way that had significant practical limitations. When an invoice arrived and needed to be reviewed, validated, and approved before payment, the process depended on a chain of manual communication. The right people needed to be emailed. Responses needed to be tracked. Follow-ups needed to be sent when approvals didn’t come through on time. And throughout all of this, there was no central place where anyone could see the current status of an invoice, who had reviewed it, who had approved it, and what, if anything, was blocking it from moving forward.
The absence of clear visibility and exception flagging meant that invoices with issues, a misread figure, a missing field, a tax discrepancy, a vendor detail that didn’t match the master record, moved through the process without triggering any structured alert. The team discovered these issues through follow-up rather than through the system. Someone would notice a discrepancy, reach out to the relevant person to investigate, wait for a response, and then work back through the process to understand where the error had entered and what it affected. This manual detective work consumed time that the team could not afford to spend on it at scale.
Follow-ups were a persistent and time-consuming feature of daily work. Validating invoice details across teams, chasing approvals that had been sent but not acted on, and confirming that the right version of an invoice was being reviewed rather than an earlier draft or a duplicate submission, all of this happened through email threads that were difficult to track and impossible to audit cleanly. The process was as fast as the slowest responder, and in a large FMCG operation with many stakeholders, there was always a bottleneck somewhere.
Slow processing cycles and delayed approvals translated directly into SLA misses. Payment commitments to vendors were not being met consistently, not because the business lacked the intent or the funds, but because the process between invoice receipt and payment release was too slow and too dependent on individual responsiveness to be reliable. Vendor relationships that Jyothy Labs depended on for continuity of supply were experiencing friction that the business wanted to eliminate.
The Solution: A process that the team adopted because it actually worked
Jyothy Labs partnered with Finifi to replace the fragmented, email-dependent invoice processing workflow with a structured, automated AP system that brought speed, visibility, and exception intelligence to the entire process from ingestion through to approval and posting.
Automated Invoice Ingestion
Finifi’s AI-led invoice ingestion captures every incoming invoice with high-accuracy reading and automated field-level validations before anything moves to the approval stage. Vendor details, tax classifications, line-item data, and duplicate checks all run automatically at the point of ingestion. Invoices that pass validation are fast-tracked to the approval queue without manual intervention. Invoices with issues are flagged immediately as exceptions with a clear, specific reason, so the team knows exactly what needs to be reviewed and resolved rather than having to discover problems through manual follow-up.
Exception-First Processing
Rather than routing every invoice through a manual review queue where team members have to check each one individually to find the ones with problems, Finifi’s exception-first processing surfaces only the invoices that genuinely need human attention. Misreads, discrepancies, and data issues are identified automatically and presented clearly in a structured exceptions queue. The manual detective work of tracing where an error came from and what it has affected is replaced by a system that has already done the diagnosis. The team makes decisions. The system does the investigation.
Mobile-Enabled Approvals
Approvals enabled on mobile devices give business and finance leaders the ability to review and clear invoices in real time from wherever they are. The approval experience is designed to be genuinely simple, presenting the relevant invoice information clearly and making the approval action straightforward from a phone. Invoices that previously waited days for approval because an approver was travelling, in meetings, or simply not at their desk now get cleared the same day. Approval cycle times that had been a persistent bottleneck contract sharply, and the predictability of the payment cycle improves in ways that vendors notice immediately.
Real Time Approval Visibility
A unified view of invoice status across the entire AP pipeline replaces the fragmented, email-based tracking that had made it impossible to know where any given invoice stood at any given moment. The team can see which invoices are in process, which are in the approval queue, which have been approved and are ready for posting, and which are flagged as exceptions awaiting resolution. Finance leadership has the real-time oversight they need to manage the AP operation proactively rather than reactively, and the follow-up work of chasing status updates disappears because the status is always visible.
Automated SAP Posting
Every invoice that completes the validation and approval workflow is posted into SAP automatically with a complete, system-driven audit trail. The manual step of re-entering approved invoice data into SAP is removed, eliminating both the delay and the error risk that manual posting introduced. The audit trail that builds through the process, capturing every validation result, every exception flag, and every approval decision with a timestamp and user record, means audit preparation requires access rather than effort.
“Our approvals were living in email threads and our team was spending too much time chasing rather than processing. Finifi changed the dynamic entirely. Exceptions are clear, approvals happen in real time, and we finally have a single view of where every invoice stands. The speed improvement was immediate.”
The Transformation: A finance team that moved from rework to real work
The transformation at Jyothy Labs was felt in the daily rhythm of the finance team almost immediately after go-live. The email threads that had been the primary coordination mechanism for invoice processing became redundant. Invoices moved through the system on their own. Exceptions surfaced clearly. Approvals happened on mobile without anyone having to chase. And for the first time, the team had a live view of where every invoice stood without having to ask anyone.
The speed of approvals was one of the most visible changes. Finance and business leaders who had previously been approving invoices in batches when they found time at their desks were now clearing them in real time from their phones. The time between invoice submission and approval, which had been stretching processing cycles and pushing payment timelines past SLA commitments, compressed dramatically. Vendors who had been experiencing inconsistent payment timing began receiving payments on schedule with a consistency that the previous process could not deliver.
The reduction in follow-up work freed the finance team’s capacity in a way that was immediately noticeable. The time that had been consumed by chasing approvals, investigating discrepancies, and correcting errors that had passed through the process undetected was redirected toward work that actually required the team’s expertise. Invoice processing became a faster, cleaner, and significantly less stressful operation.
Process transparency, which had been essentially absent in the email-based workflow, became a standard feature of how the AP function operated. Every stakeholder with a relevant interest in an invoice could see its current status, its history, and what action was needed next, without sending an email or waiting for a response. That transparency changed how the team experienced their workday and how confidently the business could make and keep payment commitments to its vendor network.
