eProcureAI / Platform / For AP teams
RoleReading, matching and chasing are mechanical. What is left after those is the small number of genuinely ambiguous invoices, and that is the part worth a person.
Written for the people doing the work. Not for the person buying the software.
Ask an accounts payable team what they spend the day on and the honest answer is typing, searching and chasing. Very little of it requires an accounts payable qualification.
An invoice arrives. Somebody keys the supplier, the amount and the lines. They find the purchase order it relates to, work out whether the goods actually arrived, and either post it or start an email to somebody who might know. Repeat, several hundred times a month.
Almost all of those invoices are completely fine. The genuinely interesting ones, where a supplier has billed for more than arrived or charged a rate nobody agreed, are a small minority buried in the volume.
Nothing here suggests the control should be relaxed. Comparing the order, the receipt and the invoice is the single most effective thing an accounts payable function does. The problem was that doing it by hand made it expensive, so under pressure it got applied to a sample rather than everything.
When the reading and matching are automatic, the check runs on every invoice. The control gets stronger while the workload gets smaller, which is rare enough to be worth saying plainly.
A large share of inbound email is suppliers asking whether an invoice was received and when it will be paid. When they can see that themselves in the portal, that volume falls away without anybody doing anything.
Supplier, amount, lines and coding, typed from a document that already contains all of it.
Searching for the purchase order an invoice relates to, then checking whether goods were received.
Emailing a receiving site to ask whether something turned up, then waiting.
Where the three documents genuinely disagree and somebody has to make a call.
Extraction pulls every field, matches the supplier even when the name is written differently from your master record, and applies the coding by rule.
The expensive part of a mismatch was always the hunting. The order, the goods receipt, prior invoices from that supplier and the calculated variance are all attached before you open it.
Suppliers see invoice and payment status in the portal, so the where is my payment email largely stops arriving. That is often the single biggest change to the daily inbox.
These are the ones where judgement is genuinely required, and each arrives with what you need to decide.
| Case | What you see | What you decide |
|---|---|---|
| Priced differently from the order | The difference, with the order attached | Accept the variance or dispute it |
| More billed than received | The goods receipt showing what arrived | Credit note or short pay |
| No purchase order | Coding suggested from similar invoices | Approve the coding or change it |
| Possible duplicate | The original invoice alongside it | Confirm or release |
| Unreadable document | The original attached | Key it manually or request a resend |
Everything else clears without reaching you, which is what makes it possible to look at these five properly.
From open commitments and goods received but not invoiced, both of which already exist in the system.
Available whenever anybody looks instead of being run as a report at a point in time.
Rather than surfacing on the last day when there is no time to resolve them.
Because credits and replacements stayed attached to the orders they relate to.
Goods receipt dates are recorded at the dock, so what belongs in the period is a fact.
Which is what makes the close plannable rather than an event people brace for.
The control gets stronger and the workload gets smaller, which is not a trade off you usually get offered.
Decide on the genuinely ambiguous invoices, and manage the supplier relationships that need a person.
Reading, matching, coding, holding and chasing, on every invoice rather than a sample.
Including the ones that cause arguments. We will run them live rather than describe what should happen.
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