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CASE STUDIES

How The Living Room Ended the Invoice Approval Chase with DOKKA

About the Company

The Living Room is a private, invitation-only membership club in Beverly Hills, California, built around members with artistic and musical interests. Membership is earned by recommendation and committee approval rather than sign-up, and the club is deliberately discreet — it doesn’t advertise, and it protects the privacy of its members and guests inside its doors.

Operationally, the club resembles a hotel without the guest rooms. It runs a full-scale food and beverage operation with several restaurants, alongside a floor of three professional-grade recording studios used by recording artists.

That breadth of operations generates a steady, high volume of supplier invoices across many departments — making efficient accounts payable essential for the finance team.

Quick facts:

  •     Private membership club in Beverly Hills, California
  •     Full-scale F&B operation with multiple restaurants
  •     Three professional-grade recording studios
  •     ~800 invoices processed per month
  •     Accounts payable run on NetSuite
  •     Invoice processing now takes under a minute per invoice with DOKKA
About
Challenge
Solution
Biggest Wins

Challenge

Before DOKKA, accounts payable at The Living Room was an entirely manual process built around NetSuite. Invoices arrived in one of several forms: by mail, by email, as a scanned copy, or dropped off in person.

A single AP person handled each invoice from start to finish. They would scan the invoice, email it to themselves, set up the vendor if it was new, and then key every detail into NetSuite by hand before attaching the scanned copy, coding the invoice, and routing it for approval.

New vendors added their own layer of work. Each one required a collected W-9 for tax purposes, banking and payment details (check or ACH), and other pertinent information before a single invoice could be entered.

The volume made this punishing. Toward month-end, the team could be entering hundreds of invoices one by one, on top of standing up new vendors.

Approvals compounded the friction. Every invoice had to be signed off — physically or electronically — before payment, which often meant chasing down approvers in person or by email while the clock ran on the month-end close.

“Before, we had to receive an invoice, then go by foot, hunt down a person, and have them sign (electronically or physically) that they approve it for payment. And only then are we able to process. When you’re in operations, you don’t check your email every 15 minutes, and it’s month-end, and we are struggling.”

— Alina Gorlanova, Director of Finance at The Living Room

Solution

The Living Room moved its accounts payable workflow onto DOKKA while keeping NetSuite as the system of record. The change was felt immediately by a finance team that had previously entered everything via keyboard.

Invoice capture is no longer the job of a single AP person. Invoices are now entered by the departments that receive them — food and beverage, for example — who check them against purchase orders and submit them directly by scanning or emailing them in.

DOKKA reads each invoice and extracts the key fields — vendor, invoice number, date, amount, and GL coding — then prepares the entry for review. Its drag-and-drop field mapping lets the team teach DOKKA how to read recurring invoice formats, and recognition improves as it learns each vendor.

Once an invoice is reviewed, it moves through DOKKA’s approval workflow. Finance sets up approvers and routes invoices to them inside the system, replacing the hunt for signatures with a structured, trackable path to payment.

“When DOKKA recognizes everything perfectly, it’s really nice — you just have to review it and publish. It’s quick, it’s painless.”

— Lilet Villanueva, Finance Controller at The Living Room

Biggest Wins

Significant Time Efficiency

DOKKA removed the manual keying that once defined AP at The Living Room. Invoices that were formerly typed into NetSuite field by field are now captured, extracted, and prepared automatically — and even when a field needs correcting, an invoice takes under a minute to process.

A Tremendous Improvement in Accuracy

With DOKKA extracting invoice data directly and learning recurring vendor formats over time, the team leans far less on manual entry. That means cleaner, more consistent data flowing into NetSuite and more confidence in what gets processed for payment.

A Structured Approval Workflow

Approvals that once depended on tracking people down in person or by email now run through DOKKA. Finance sets up approvers and routes invoices to them within the system, creating a clear, trackable timeline from receipt to payment — a welcome change during the month-end crunch.

“For me, DOKKA really is an efficiency tool that helps reduce the manual effort of entering invoices, improve accuracy, and improve the workflow.”

— Alina Gorlanova, Director of Finance at The Living Room

Agentic AP Automation

See how you can take your invoice processing from 5 minutes to 1 minute per invoice, with DOKKA. 

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