Merchant & Gould

Supporting an intellectual property law firm

Merchant & Gould, founded in 1900, is a full-service intellectual property law firm that focuses exclusively on IP law. The firm helps sole inventors, emerging and established companies, universities, venture capitalists, and Fortune 500 and 100 companies gain leverage in new and existing markets.

For its accounts payable team, handling foreign associates’ invoices created a time-consuming administrative challenge.

Managing a manual invoice process

Before Corpay, Merchant & Gould found its approach to invoice processing tedious and manual. Incoming email requests and invoices arrived in different mailboxes across company departments.

The AP team, made up of only a few individuals, relied on colleagues to forward invoices to the appropriate accounting department. Once those emails were consolidated, the team could pay the invoices manually.

This left room for error and misplaced or missing invoices. Accounting staff and attorneys spent many hours reviewing submissions and tracking down invoices. Asking foreign associates to copy the AP team on correspondence also led to an overload of irrelevant emails.

Building on IAS with a vendor invoice portal

Merchant & Gould began its relationship with Corpay in 2011, selecting Corpay’s Invoice Automation Solution (IAS) to improve its accounts payable processes for foreign associates’ invoices.

In 2023, the firm added Corpay’s Global Vendor Invoice Portal (Global VIP) to streamline invoice collection.

Through Global VIP, vendors can upload their invoices directly to the portal and initiate automated invoice processing with currency conversion capabilities. The AP team then checks and approves invoices for payment in the portal.

Bringing invoice emails under control

Adopting Global VIP changed how Merchant & Gould received and handled vendor invoices.

Instead of receiving 800 incoming invoice emails a day across dispersed departmental inboxes, the firm received a couple of focused emails. This allowed the team to spend time on important inquiries.

Global VIP also groups invoices by vendor, saving the AP team time and supporting more accurate and timely invoice processing.

Moving invoice submission to vendors

The case study’s April 2024 results show how invoice submission shifted toward vendors.

That month, only 6 invoices needed to be uploaded by Merchant & Gould through the Corpay IAS client portal, while vendors uploaded 819 invoices through Global VIP.

The change reduced touches in the firm’s system and supported more timely and accurate client invoicing.

Making foreign currency invoices easier to manage

Vendor management and paying invoices in foreign currencies became easier for Merchant & Gould through the portal’s user-friendly interface.

The firm also encouraged many vendors to bill in their local currencies rather than USD.

Together, IAS and Global VIP gave the firm a more streamlined workflow for handling global invoices.

Ongoing support from the Global VIP team

Corpay’s Global VIP team supported Merchant & Gould through frequent communication and check-ins, listening to pain points and providing solutions.

Regular contact during the transition helped the firm resolve issues and move business partners through the process. Corpay continued to build on its personalized solution offering based on feedback from the Merchant & Gould team.

For the firm, the relationship provided more confidence when paying international invoices and helped establish a reliable internal workflow.

Learn more about Corpay Cross-Border’s Global Invoice Automation solution.

Read the full case study to see how Merchant & Gould uses automated invoice processing and Global VIP to streamline foreign associates’ invoices.

Cross-Border

Payments Automation