How to Calculate the ROI of Automating Invoice Entry in Epicor Kinetic

For a manufacturer on Epicor Kinetic, calculate the return on Fluent: the time your team spends keying each supplier invoice today, minus the 55 seconds a person spends reviewing a Fluent draft, times your volume and your loaded hourly cost, set against Fluent's published price. If the cost you need to cut is paying suppliers, a payments platform such as AvidXchange, Tipalti or BILL is the better fit, and its return comes from payment fees and card revenue, which this formula does not measure.

This guide walks through the formula, a worked example for a hypothetical manufacturer keying 800 supplier invoices a month, the assumption that moves the answer most, and what to leave out. The ROI calculator runs the same arithmetic. Every number below is marked either as measured by Fluent, with its source and period, or as an assumption you replace with your own.

The formula

Annual labour saved = invoices a month × (minutes to key one by hand minus review minutes with Fluent) ÷ 60 × loaded hourly cost × 12

Net annual return = annual labour saved + any optional lines you can evidence, minus Fluent's annual cost

Nothing is weighted, discounted or smoothed on the way through. The inputs:

• Invoices a month. Supplier invoices and credit memos your team keys into AP Invoice Entry. Leave out any that already reach Epicor through EDI with nobody keying them.
• Minutes to key one by hand. From opening the email to saving the invoice in Epicor: finding the vendor and the purchase order, keying the header and lines, matching receipts and checking prices. Time twenty real invoices, awkward ones included. The calculator starts at seven minutes as a placeholder for your own figure.
• Review minutes with Fluent. What a person still spends on an invoice Fluent has already read, matched against the purchase order and receipts, and drafted. Fluent's production median is 55 seconds (0.92 minutes) per document, across 25,359 documents reviewed in the 90 days to 1 September 2026. The middle half of those reviews took between 32 and 104 seconds. The mean across the same reviews is 115 seconds, pulled up by a tail of long ones, so it describes a rare document better than a typical one.
• Loaded hourly cost. Salary, payroll tax and benefits, per hour, for the person who keys invoices. The calculator starts at $35.

Worked example: 800 supplier invoices a month

The manufacturer here is hypothetical. Its volume, keying time and hourly cost are assumptions chosen to show the arithmetic; replace them with yours.

On an annual Starter plan the same volume costs $10,500 a year: $6,000 for 150,000 credits pooled across the year, plus 90,000 credits at $0.05. That raises the net return to $23,567. Either way, the labour saved each month is about 2.9 times the monthly bill.

The credit figure is an estimate. Fluent meters each document at the work it actually takes, so a long invoice draws more than a short one; the trial shows what your own invoices draw.

The assumption that moves the answer

Minutes to key an invoice by hand decides the result far more than anything else. Here is the same hypothetical manufacturer, 800 invoices a month at $35 an hour, with the keying time and the review time changed:

At this volume and hourly cost, Fluent's monthly-billed cost is covered once an invoice takes about three minutes to key by hand. If your own timing comes in near that line, treat the business case as close and let the trial decide.

Optional lines

Add these only when your own records give the number. Without records, leave them out of the headline: the labour line usually decides the case on its own.

• Duplicate payments avoided. Before review, Fluent flags an invoice number Epicor already holds for that vendor. Use what duplicate payments cost you last year: amounts written off plus the time spent recovering them.
• Overbilling caught. Fluent matches each invoice two-way or three-way against the purchase order and the receipts behind it, checks quantity against what is still left to bill, and puts any price difference on the line. Count only overbilling you can show was paid in the past year.
• Early-payment discounts. If suppliers offer discount terms you miss because invoices wait to be keyed, the line is the value of those invoices in a year × the discount rate. Count only discounts lost to entry delay, and only if AP will actually pay early.

What not to count

• Headcount you will not change. The calculator prices every hour back at the loaded rate. That holds when the hours replace overtime, temporary staff or a planned hire. If the same people stay and take on other work, present the hours as capacity and let whoever approves the business case value them.
• The review time. It is already subtracted. Counting the full manual time as saved overstates the result.
• Invoices that never needed keying, such as those already arriving through EDI.
• Faster approvals, before you measure them. Approvers still approve. Fluent's approval agent briefs each approver before they open the invoice, but count the time saved only once you have seen it on your own invoices.
• Supplier payments. Fluent does not pay suppliers, so payment fees, card rebates and check costs belong in a payments platform's business case.

What goes into Fluent's cost

• The plan. Starter at $600 a month with 12,500 credits, Growth at $1,200 with 27,000, Scale at $2,400 with 57,000. Credits beyond the plan cost $0.05 each. Annual plans pool twelve months of credits at a lower rate.
• Users and approvers. Every plan has unlimited users and agents, so adding approvers costs nothing.
• Onboarding. There is no implementation project and no separate services agreement. Technical setup is one 30-minute call; a second session trains the people who will review invoices. Budget your Epicor administrator's time to create the integration account and API key and import the access scope.
• Add-ons, only if you want them. A Vendor Portal, where suppliers send invoices straight to Fluent and ask about their own purchase orders and receipts, is $500 a month.
• The trial. Invited teams start on a 30-day trial on one agent with a credit balance included, and pay only when the trial converts.

The guide to what AI invoice automation costs a small manufacturer prices other volumes and lists the hidden costs to ask any vendor about.

How to run it on your own numbers

1. Time twenty of your own invoices from email to saved in AP Invoice Entry, including partial shipments, freight lines and suppliers who print their own part numbers.
2. Enter your monthly volume, minutes and loaded hourly cost in the ROI calculator.
3. Enter the same volume in the estimator on the pricing page for the plan and its monthly cost.
4. Subtract the second from the first, and add optional lines only where your records support them.
5. During the trial, compare the review time on your own invoices with the 55 seconds used here. Fluent's analytics dashboard shows it for your own volume.

See it on your own invoices

The AP automation page covers how Fluent drafts supplier invoices for AP Invoice Entry, and the guide to automating Epicor AP Invoice Entry compares every option. Check the pricing, work through the ROI calculator with your own figures, and to see your own invoices drafted, book a demo.