Case Study: Out of the Inbox, Into the System

How Yamaha Financial Services Automated Vendor Invoice & Fee Management with MBSi

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The Challenge

Yamaha Financial Services managed fee requests and invoicing through a maze of email. Service providers submitted fee requests manually, one recovery at a time, creating a challenge that fell on the Accounts Payable team.

Every week, requests arrived by email and had to be checked one by one against approvals. For each invoice, that meant digging through inboxes to verify:

The fee had already been approved by the collateral team
The fee had already been invoiced or paid, to catch duplicates
The amount matched the correct contracted rate, which varied by forwarder
That supporting documentation could even be found, since records were scattered across email threads and folders.

To understand the true scope of the problem, Yamaha Financial Services ran an internal time study and confirmed what the team had suspected all along: they were spending 30 hours a month manually reviewing fees and invoices. The process needed automation.

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Yamaha Financial Services Partnered with MBSi

Yamaha Financial Services identified that it needed a way to automate fee approvals — a faster, more consistent process that didn’t rely on one person manually cross-checking every invoice. That search led to Smart Invoicing, MBSi’s automated fee management and invoicing tool.

With Smart Invoicing in place, Yamaha Financial Services uploaded contracted rates for its service providers and set approval thresholds directly in the platform. From there, the system took over the routine work: whenever a service provider submitted a fee request or invoice, Smart Invoicing automatically validated it against those contracted rates, auto-approving anything that matched and flagging the rest for manual review.

Once a recovery was complete, service providers could submit invoices straight into that same approval flow — no separate process required.

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The Results

Case Study: Out of the Inbox, Into the System

Since going live, Yamaha Financial Services auto-approves 86.6% of the invoices it receives and 88% of fee requests. Fee requests outside auto-approval thresholds were resolved within two days of receipt.

Storage fees, which used to take up to 100 minutes to review individually, are now automatically approved 85.3% of the time, freeing the team to focus on higher-priority work.

The shift shows up beyond the numbers, too. Contracted rates now live inside the platform instead of a spreadsheet or a stack of PDFs, so fee validation happens automatically. And because every invoice, contract, and communication trail is stored and searchable in one place, Yamaha Financial Services’ team no longer digs through scattered email threads to answer a basic question about an approval.

That single source of truth has changed how Yamaha Financial Services manages its vendor relationships, too. Yamaha Financial Services approves fees faster, cutting days to repo by 9.2% in H1 2026 vs. H1 2025 — recoveries complete sooner, and vendors get paid faster.

When a service provider has a dispute, the team pulls up the full history in seconds instead of searching through old emails, shortening turnaround time and reducing friction across the network.

“Smart Invoicing has streamlined our invoicing and fee review process. What used to require 30 hours of work per month now takes only a few focused hours, allowing us to spend more time on vendor relationships and strategic priorities.”

James Yao, Vendor Management Specialist, Yamaha Financial Services

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Conclusion

Smart Invoicing has changed the shape of Yamaha Financial Services’ invoice review process — from a fully manual, one-person bottleneck into a system where the team’s attention goes only where it’s genuinely needed.

Automating the routine 85%+ of approvals hasn’t just saved hours; it has given Yamaha Financial Services a more consistent, auditable, and scalable foundation for managing its forwarder network as it grows.

That speed carries through the entire recovery cycle: Yamaha Financial Services approves fees faster, cutting days to repo by 9.2% in H1 2026 vs. H1 2025, so recoveries complete sooner, vendors get paid faster, and Yamaha spends less in time and money carrying each case to close.

For teams considering Smart Invoicing, their advice is simple:

“If you’re looking for a smarter way to improve efficiency in your workflow and serve as a go-to source for reliable information, give Smart Invoicing a try.”

Cathy Benitez, Vendor Specialist, Yamaha Financial Services