thousands of monthly invoices. After researching products in the market, they realized that most were just too big, too expensive, or put far too much burden of implementation on their small AP team. They wanted a solution that would not only help them to stem the growth of their AP department, but something that would enhance communication with their vendors.

Prasad Dissanayake, President of Tidewater and engineer by profession, tapped friend and software engineer, Dimuthu Roshan, in Sri Lanka to recruit a development team to build what would eventually become PaperTrl. In less than one year the software transformed the Tidewater AP function. Payback came quickly as Tidewater saw huge increases in AP efficiencies.

Due to its popularity among users and vendors, Tidewater decided to commercialize PaperTrl. Prasad chose software industry veteran Steve Weber as CEO. Steve had spent most of his career leading software companies that were focused on developing, marketing and supporting integration solutions for ERP and accounting software. As such he came with many years’ experience in the Intuit, SAGE, Microsoft Dynamics, Oracle, and SAP communities.

Shilpa Marano joined the team as COO having worked with Steve at integration startup nChannel and IBM Sterling Commerce. Shilpa brought years of experience building successful marketing and product teams.

Together with Dimuthu now serving as CIO, Steve and Shilpa were able to direct PaperTrl’s functionality to address an area of the market that was being underserved – specifically, an easy to implement, easy to use, but highly functional AP automation solution at an affordable price.