MHC Automation Built NorthStar's Invoice Intake on Files.com Instead of Customer-Run SFTP Servers

MHC Automation builds accounts payable automation and document and content management software. Its products support invoice capture, AP workflow, and payroll and year-end document production.

NorthStar is MHC's cloud AP automation platform, and AP automation is one of the flagship products that runs on it. The product's job is to capture the data on a customer's invoices and carry each one through workflow until Finance pays it. Before any of that automation can start, every customer has to do the same thing: get invoice files into MHC's cloud. That intake step is where MHC's problem lived.

The Intake Edge Was the Part MHC Controlled Least

The intake path crosses three environments. MHC's OCR layer runs in the customer's environment, converting PDF and image invoices into text, XML, or JSON. Those files then have to travel to MHC's cloud, where NorthStar polls its Azure Blob storage for new files to ingest. The middle leg, the transfer itself, did not belong to MHC.

MHC had no SFTP capability to offer. A customer that wanted to deliver files over SFTP stood up its own server, opened a firewall port, and administered its own credentials. Every one of those endpoints was another environment MHC's support team had to work through when an invoice feed broke. Diagnosing a problem at the edge of MHC's own flagship product meant going through someone else's server, someone else's firewall, and someone else's IT department. The intake edge was the part of the product MHC controlled least, and customers noticed: they were asking MHC for an SFTP capability delivered as part of the platform itself.

MHC needed a managed SFTP capability it could deliver with NorthStar rather than another collection of per-customer servers. NorthStar was early in its life and growing, and every new customer using OCR intake needed the whole path provisioned again. Per-customer intake arrangements stopped being something MHC could absorb one at a time.

What the fix had to do was specific. The endpoint had to be one MHC operates and can see into, carrying MHC's own name. Files had to land directly in MHC's Azure Blob storage, where NorthStar already collects them, so nothing about the product's ingestion would change. And setup for each new OCR intake customer had to be a routine rather than a project, because each one needs the same two things: a test environment and a production one.

MHC selected Files.com to be that intake edge.

Managed SFTP in Front, MHC's Own Azure Storage Behind

The pipeline now runs as a single path. OCR output leaves the customer's environment over SFTP and lands on MHC's Files.com site, which runs on MHC's own domain, so the endpoint every customer connects to reads as MHC's. Files.com Remote Server Mounts connect that site straight through to MHC's Azure Blob storage: a file uploaded over SFTP passes through to MHC's own backing store in real time, with nothing stored twice and nothing to keep in sync. NorthStar's polling jobs collect each file from Blob storage and run the invoice through workflow to Finance for payment.

Each NorthStar customer that uses OCR intake is provisioned a pair of Files.com accounts when they come onboard, one for UAT and one for production. That pair is the Files.com intake setup.

Onboarding an OCR Intake Customer Is Now a Provisioning Routine

With Files.com in production as NorthStar's intake edge, MHC created a managed alternative to per-customer infrastructure arrangements.

• When an invoice feed breaks, MHC troubleshoots it on a platform it manages. The diagnosis starts with the file and the account, not with a request to a customer's IT team about their server and their firewall.
• Onboarding a new intake customer is a provisioning step: create the UAT and production accounts and point the customer's OCR output at the endpoint. MHC adds four to six new accounts a month as NorthStar sells.
• The path runs at product scale. Over a trailing twelve months, MHC's API transaction volume placed it among the top 50 of Files.com's more than 4,000 customers.
• The capability customers asked for is now part of what MHC delivers: a NorthStar customer can get a managed SFTP endpoint with the product without standing up a server or opening a firewall port to send MHC an invoice.

File Intake Became Part of the Product

Today, MHC manages the intake edge for NorthStar customers using its SFTP path without building file-transfer infrastructure or taking on administration of its customers' servers. Secure invoice intake now scales as a per-customer provisioning routine alongside NorthStar sales. For a SaaS vendor whose product depends on customers delivering files into it, that is what the transfer layer should be: not a server anyone has to run, but a piece of the product.