Dust-A-Side
Dust-a-Side (DAS) is a South African company providing dust suppression and road management services to mines, rural roads, process plants, and construction sites across Africa. With operations across six African countries, purchasing spans multiple entities, currencies, and remote locations, all managed by a single centralized finance team.
Key Products
Integrations
Industry
Mining & ResourcesLocation
Gauteng, South AfricaCompany Size
501-1000Website
https://dustaside.com/
The challenges
Without AP automation or a consistent procurement process across six countries, Dust-a-Side’s finance team had no reliable way to validate what had been ordered, received, and billed before payment was committed.
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Approvals stalled across a distributed operation
Senior approvers were responsible for purchase sign-off across multiple countries but were rarely at a desk. Requests stalled in email inboxes and controls were difficult to enforce, slowing purchasing across the group.
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Invoices paid without proof of delivery
Without a structured receiving step, DAS had no reliable basis to validate invoices at the point of payment. Delivery documentation from remote mine sites frequently arrived late or never reached head office. When it did, there was no system in place to enforce a match between the purchase order, delivery note, and invoice before payment was processed.
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No spend visibility until month-end
With no system connecting approvals to budgets in real time, budget owners had no way to see committed spend or upcoming liabilities until the month-end variance report arrived. By then the spend had already happened.
The solution
Dust-a-Side’s Group CFO, André van der Westhuizen, had used Procurify at a previous company, and his positive experience made it an obvious choice when looking to automate spend. DAS configured two domains, one for South Africa in rand and one for the African entities in USD, bringing all purchasing and invoice processing into a single system for the first time.
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Automated approval routing across all entities
Purchase requests route automatically to the right approvers based on entity and spend threshold. Approval pools allow any authorized director to approve from their preferred device, keeping purchasing moving regardless of location.
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AI-powered invoice capture and three-way matching
AP automation replaced the manual invoice process end-to-end. Invoices land in a dedicated Procurify inbox where AI extracts the details into a draft bill, with account codes carried through from the original requisition. Each invoice is then matched against the approved PO and receiving data, flagging discrepancies before payment is committed.
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Real-time budget visibility at point of approval
As soon as a request is approved, it hits the budget, giving managers across every entity a live view of committed spend in the correct currency for their region.
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Mobile-first approvals and receipt capture in the field
Field teams photograph delivery notes on site and receive goods directly in the app, giving the finance team everything they need to match the purchase order, receipt, and invoice before payment is committed.
Takeaways
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$1.58M in orders rejected before payment was committed
Unauthorized and incorrect orders are now caught and stopped in the approval workflow before they reach payment.
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100% PO-backed billing from go-live, every month
Every bill matched to an approved purchase order, every month, across a six-country multi-currency operation. No invoice reaches payment without an approved order behind it.
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$1.45M in committed spend visible to finance ahead of invoicing
Finance can see what’s committed, by whom, and against which budget across all six countries at any point in the month, not limited to month-end when it’s too late to act.
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1.38x faster approvals across a distributed field operation
Mobile approvals and approval pools replaced email inboxes, keeping purchasing moving regardless of where approvers are.
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40% of users active on mobile within 8 months
Field teams are able to complete the receiving step on site and approvers can review requests from the field, removing documentation delays that previously made three-way matching unreliable.
