‍The opportunity

Crown Crafts is a leader in infant and toddler products based in Louisiana. Their portfolio includes the high-quality brands Manhattan Toy, NoJo, Neat Solutions, and Sassy. With lines for mealtime, bathtime, bedtime, and playtime, Crown Crafts has provided families with quality products for over 60 years.

With the recent acquisitions of Manhattan Toy and Baby Boom, Crown Crafts was looking to scale its accounts payable (AP) operations more efficiently to support brand growth while maintaining financial visibility across the brand portfolio.

Crown Crafts processes over 1,000 invoices a month, requiring more automation to improve efficiency and reduce manual work. Their current system requires significant headcount dedicated to time-consuming AP tasks for invoice processing and approvals. 

As the company grows through acquisitions, Crown Crafts faces the challenge of inheriting new vendor lists with each acquisition. They needed a solution capable of handling these new vendors seamlessly without the burden of building new templates for every vendor invoice. Crown Crafts sought a platform to streamline invoice approval workflows, reduce reliance on manual processes, and allow their finance team to shift focus from tedious AP tasks to more strategic, high-value activities.

The solution

Crown Crafts chose the Vic.ai platform to revolutionize their AP operations. By leveraging AI-powered invoice processing capabilities — which seamlessly integrate with their ERP, Microsoft Business Central — they will streamline their AP process from invoice processing to purchase order (PO) matching to payments. Vic.ai also brings a critical enhancement to the team — the ability to leverage PO data to perform a 3-way match with invoices, ensuring more accuracy and compliance while reducing manual intervention.

With Vic.ai, Crown Crafts gains real-time financial insights and visibility across its portfolio of brands, allowing the team to maintain control over its AP workflows while continuing to scale. Additionally, the platform’s improved approval workflows will help Crown Crafts redeploy headcount previously tied to manual AP tasks, enhancing overall productivity and efficiency.

By automating these key AP processes, Crown Crafts is well-positioned to drive operational excellence in its finance department, continue its growth trajectory, and ensure high financial control and transparency.

"Vic.ai allows us to scale through acquisitions without the friction of adapting to new vendor formats. Its AI-powered platform automatically adjusts to new vendor lists, enabling us to streamline AP and continue growing without overhauling our systems," says Craig Demarest, Vice President and Chief Financial Officer at Crown Crafts. "As we process over 1,000 invoices monthly across multiple brands, Vic.ai’s automation and 3-way PO matching will streamline our workflows and reduce manual tasks. This will give us the visibility and control we need to grow efficiently. We're looking forward to the continued operational improvements Vic.ai will bring as we scale with our existing team."

Learn more about Crown Crafts.

Learn more about the Vic.ai autonomous finance platform.