In commercial real estate (CRE), every economic cycle brings a familiar challenge: how to maintain operational momentum without expanding headcount. As the market is faced with an uncertain nearterm path, CRE firms are already tightening budgets, enforcing hiring freezes, and shifting priorities. But invoices still need to be coded. Budgets still need to be tracked. Vendors still need to be paid.

If hiring is off the table, the only path forward is smarter operations.

The Hidden Burden of Manual AP

For many CRE firms, accounts payable is still one of the most manual, labor-intensive functions in the back office. Each invoice demands attention—data entry, coding, routing, approvals. It’s a time sink for overburdened teams who are already stretched thin. Worse, when institutional knowledge is siloed within just one or two individuals, even a single departure can create chaos.

Under normal conditions, you might solve this by hiring. But today, that’s not an option.

So how do you build resiliency into your AP process—when growth isn’t in the cards?

Automation as a Force Multiplier

The answer isn’t to work harder or “do more with less.” It’s to work differently–to work smarter!

New technologies, particularly AI-powered automation, can drastically reduce the workload tied to AP without requiring new hires. Rather than offloading tasks to outsourced teams, these solutions improve internal capacity by eliminating the manual steps entirely.

Here’s how automation helps CRE accounting teams scale:

• Intelligent invoice ingestion eliminates manual data entry
• Auto-coding based contextual understanding reduces error and rework
• Streamlined workflows keep invoices moving—even with fewer hands on deck
• Improved visibility and audit trails support compliance and reporting without extra oversight

Resilience Starts with Removing Bottlenecks

Every manual process is a potential point of failure. When invoice coding relies on one person’s memory—or approval routing depends on daily check-ins—small delays compound quickly. In high-volume environments, that’s a risk you can’t afford.

Automation isn’t just about efficiency—it’s about control. It’s about ensuring that your accounting operations continue to run smoothly, even when your team is understaffed, distracted, or in transition.

Case in Point: The Related Group

When headcount is fixed, the only way to scale is to make each team member more effective. That’s exactly what The Related Group did when they realized their AP process couldn’t keep up with their growth.

Like many CRE organizations, they were operating with a small but experienced AP team. Over time, those team members accumulated a wealth of internal knowledge—how to code for specific vendors, match invoices to properties and GLs, and flag common errors. But all that information lived in their heads. Training new hires was slow and painful, and losing even one experienced team member created real operational risk.

Rather than increasing staff, the company invested in automating the coding portion of their AP process. By leveraging their historical invoice data, they created a system that could mimic the decisions their AP team had made in the past—coding invoices automatically, learning from corrections, and improving over time.

The result?

• Invoice throughput tripled, without expanding the team
• Turnover became less disruptive, as institutional knowledge was preserved in the system
• Manual data entry was virtually eliminated, freeing up staff to focus on oversight, not inputs
• New hires ramped up faster, because fewer decisions relied on tribal knowledge

In the words of one leader on their technology team: turnover used to cause months of disruption. Now, new hires can get up to speed quickly, and the team as a whole is more focused, more accurate, and more scalable.

Don’t Let Headcount Define Capacity

Economic uncertainties don’t last forever, but the decisions you make now will impact your team’s stability and scalability long after things level out. By future-proofing your accounting processes today, you’re not just adapting to lean times—you’re building a more resilient foundation for whatever comes next.

In CRE, you don’t always get to choose when or how to grow. But you can choose to be ready.