AP Automation Software for Sage 300 CRE: Best Tools 2026

Short answer: if you run Sage 300 CRE, the realistic AP automation shortlist is AvidXchange TimberScan, hh2 and Stampli. TimberScan is the deepest fit because AvidXchange bought the company that built it specifically for Sage 300 CRE. hh2 is the routing and coding specialist. Stampli brings the strongest invoice-side experience but connects to Sage 300 CRE by file, not by live API. None of the three publishes a price.

What Sage 300 CRE already does for AP, and where it stops

Half the vendor pitches you will hear imply Sage 300 CRE has no accounts payable. That is not true, and knowing exactly where the native module stops is what keeps a demo honest.

Natively, Sage 300 CRE records payables through manual invoice entry tied to jobs and cost codes, tracks commitments against subcontracts, schedules retention holdback, and offers configurable approval routing so an invoice can move through a chain of reviewers before it posts. For a contractor whose invoice volume is modest and whose AP clerk is fast, that is a working system.

What it does not do is the front half. It will not pull an invoice out of an email or off a scanner, it will not read the line items, and it will not code them to the right job, cost code and cost type on its own. It also does not perform automated two-way or three-way matching. You can reference a purchase order during entry, but a person still has to look up the commitment, check the quantities and pricing, and link the invoice line to the correct PO line by hand.

So the gap a third-party tool fills is specific: capture, coding, matching, and letting a superintendent approve from a phone instead of a desktop ERP license. If a vendor is selling you approval routing as the headline, they are selling you something you already own.

AvidXchange TimberScan

TimberScan is the closest thing to a native answer. AvidXchange acquired Core Associates, the company that built TimberScan, explicitly to lead AP automation in construction, and the product was designed around Sage 300 CRE rather than adapted to it. Its interface deliberately mirrors the AP invoice entry screen your clerk already uses, complete with alerts and budget versus actual displays, which cuts the retraining problem to almost nothing.

Capture runs on OCR with what AvidXchange calls Smart Extraction. Approvals route automatically "based on various criteria, such as role, vendor, job, commitment", which is the construction-shaped routing you want. Lien waiver records update automatically, which is the one genuinely construction-specific compliance feature any of these vendors markets. Adding AvidPay makes it purchase to pay in one system, and AvidXchange publishes an implementation window of 60 to 90 days for TimberScan with embedded pay.

The trade-offs: no published pricing, and buying TimberScan puts you inside the AvidXchange commercial orbit at a moment when that orbit is shifting. Corpay and TPG took AvidXchange private in October 2025 in a $2.2 billion deal, with Corpay holding a 33 percent stake. That is not a reason to avoid it, but it is a reason to ask about roadmap and contract terms rather than assume continuity. Our AvidXchange vs Corpay comparison covers what the deal changed.

hh2

hh2 is the specialist most Sage 300 CRE shops have heard of from a peer rather than from an ad. It takes "email, PDF, or paper invoices scanned directly into hh2", pulls Sage 300 job, vendor and cost code data to reduce coding errors, and routes invoices "to PMs, supers, or execs" with every step tracked. Approvals happen from any device, which is the field problem solved. Approved invoices sync directly into Sage 300.

Its published claims are unusually concrete for this category: coding errors cut by 99 percent, and 3,600 or more construction accounting teams using it. One customer quote on the same page cites invoice turnaround improving by more than 40 percent. It does not market lien waiver handling and it does not publish pricing.

hh2 is the right shortlist entry when your problem is squarely coding and field approval and you are not trying to replace how you pay people. It is a narrower product than TimberScan and that is often the point.

Stampli

Stampli has the best invoice-side experience of the three. Every question, coding change and approval lives on the invoice itself, so the argument between a PM and a controller about one line happens where the line is rather than in a mail thread. For Sage 300 CRE it syncs a genuinely deep set of master data: "Companies, Vendors, Departments, GLs, items, POs, and any other custom fields including Cost Type, Retainage, Job Contracts, Change Orders, and more." It supports two-way and three-way PO matching, and AP teams can add charges such as taxes and shipping against an open PO.

The detail that decides the deal: Stampli's Sage 300 CRE integration is file-based. Master data flows out of Sage 300 CRE into Stampli, and transactions flow back as formatted files that create invoice and payment records, with the customer success team building "a file that is unique to your organization". That is outbound file integration, not a live bidirectional API. It works, and plenty of contractors run it happily, but it is a different operational reality from a connector that posts directly, and it is worth pricing the difference in reconciliation time before you sign. Stampli says it "deploys in weeks, not months".

Worth knowing: Stampli's deeper construction credential is on the other Sage product, where it states it is "the only AP Automation solution recommended by Sage for Intacct Construction". If your ERP decision is still open, that matters. See our AvidXchange vs Stampli comparison for the wider feature picture.

What about Procore, BILL and Ramp?

Procore has a Sage 300 CRE Connector, but its invoice management is built around owner and subcontractor billing on projects, not general accounts payable. The fuel invoice, the equipment rental and the office lease do not live there. Most contractors running Procore still need an AP tool underneath it.

BILL and Ramp are both credible AP products and neither publishes a Sage 300 CRE connector. BILL integrates with QuickBooks, Xero, Sage Intacct and NetSuite. Ramp's published answer for the construction ERPs it does not connect to is a Universal CSV export mapped to your chart of accounts, tracking categories and project codes. That is honest and workable, but it is an export and a reimport, not a posting. Both are reasonable if you are on Sage 300 CRE and genuinely willing to move data by file; neither is the natural pick.

What it costs

None of AvidXchange, hh2 or Stampli publishes list pricing, so any number you see quoted elsewhere is somebody's guess. What you can control is what you ask for. Get the twelve-month total in writing, broken into subscription, implementation, per-entity charges and payment fees.

Per-entity pricing is the one that catches contractors out. If you run a separate entity per joint venture or per development, a suite priced per entity scales in a direction your invoice volume does not. Ask explicitly how a second and a fifth entity are charged before you compare monthly numbers. The same discipline applies across the category, which we broke down in our AP automation pricing guide.

How to run the evaluation

Take one real invoice, the worst one from last month, ideally a material invoice that split across three jobs and arrived as a phone photograph. Make every vendor process that invoice live on the call, then watch what happens next.

1. Does it post into your Sage 300 CRE instance, carrying the job, the cost code and the cost type? Ask to see it land, not a screenshot of a different company's ledger.
2. Is that posting an API write or a file import? Both are legitimate. Only one of them is what most people assume they are buying.
3. What happens when the lien waiver has not come back? If the answer is a spreadsheet, the tool does not do waivers. AvidXchange is the one on this list that markets it.
4. Can a superintendent approve on a phone without an ERP license? If not, approvals will stall regardless of how good the capture is.
5. How does it handle a commitment? Sage 300 CRE tracks commitments natively but will not match against them automatically. Find out whether the tool actually closes that gap or just references it.

If commitments are where your process leaks and your subcontract paperwork still lives in spreadsheets, fixing the front of that chain with dedicated purchase order software before you shop for AP tooling will make the AP evaluation much simpler, because you will know what a correct match is supposed to look like.

Where a focused tool beats a suite

All three of the specialists above are good products and all three involve a sales cycle, an implementation project and a contract. That is the right trade when job cost coding across dozens of active jobs is genuinely consuming a clerk's week. It is the wrong trade when the actual bottleneck is narrower: invoices arriving as photographs and PDFs that somebody retypes line by line before anyone even thinks about a job code.

That narrower problem is what we built AutoPayables for. It reads vendor, invoice number, dates, totals and every line item off layouts it has never seen, and each line carries its own GL account, so the coding happens at the line rather than the invoice. Contractors who use us create a GL code per job or per phase and code lines to it, which gives a coded, searchable payables record per job without a job-cost ledger. It is honest to say that stops working somewhere north of fifty active jobs.

It is equally honest to say what we do not do: no job, cost code or cost type as native fields, no retainage, no lien waivers, no AIA pay applications, no two-way or three-way matching, and no sync into Sage 300 CRE, which remains on our roadmap with a REST API available today on the Scale plan. If you need those, buy TimberScan. If you need the retyping to stop this week, start free and run one invoice through. The full field is laid out in our comparison of AP automation software for construction, alongside the wider Sage 300 AP automation picture.