eProcureAI / Platform / Automate invoice processing
Use caseReading an invoice, finding the order it belongs to and checking whether the goods arrived is work a machine does better. What is left is the genuinely ambiguous, and that is where people are worth having.
Nothing pays before it is checked. An invoice with no goods receipt is held rather than paid.
An invoice arrives carrying information that is already in your system. Somebody types it in again anyway.
The vendor is already on your supplier list. The amount was agreed on a purchase order. The line items came out of a catalog. Whether the goods arrived was recorded, or should have been, at a loading dock. Every one of those facts exists somewhere, and the traditional accounts payable job is to gather them by hand and check they agree.
Multiply that by four hundred a month and you have a team whose week is consumed by data entry, working on invoices that are almost all completely fine.
Comparing the order, the goods receipt and the invoice is the oldest control in accounts payable and still the most effective. The problem was never the check, it was that doing it manually made it expensive enough that teams skipped it under pressure.
When the reading and matching happen automatically, the check runs on everything rather than on a sample. What reaches a person is the small number where the three documents genuinely disagree, and those arrive with the evidence already gathered.
Email, portal or a photograph taken on a dock. Format is rarely the obstacle people expect it to be.
Header and line data, vendor matched even when the name is written differently from your records.
The order it belongs to, and whether a goods receipt exists against it.
Price, quantity, tax and freight within the tolerances you set.
This is the part worth a person, and it is a small fraction of the volume.
Extraction pulls the fields, matches the supplier and applies the coding before anybody opens the invoice. The keystrokes simply stop.
Clean invoices post and schedule under your terms. Ones that disagree stop. Duplicates are blocked outright rather than flagged for somebody to notice.
The expensive part of a mismatch is the hunting. The order, the receipt, prior invoices from that supplier and the calculated variance are attached before your team opens it.
These account for almost everything an accounts payable team sees that is not routine.
| Case | What happens | Who acts |
|---|---|---|
| No purchase order | Routes through an approval flow you define, with coding suggested from similar invoices | Whoever you nominate |
| Priced differently from the order | Held as a dispute with the difference calculated and the order attached | Accounts payable |
| More billed than received | Held, with the goods receipt attached showing the shortfall | Accounts payable, then the supplier |
| Duplicate | Blocked outright, with the original invoice attached | Accounts payable, to confirm |
| Credit note | Applied against the specific shortfall and linked to the original order | Automatic |
Credits and replacements stay attached to the order they relate to, so what you actually owe a supplier is always current.
Worth a decision, because accepting it sets a precedent with that supplier.
A credit conversation, and the receipt already proves the position.
Legitimate spend without a purchase order, routed for approval with coding suggested.
Worth a look, particularly where banking details are being set up for the first time.
Rare, and routed to a person with the original attached rather than guessed at.
Handled on the record rather than in an email chain, so the history stays with the invoice.
The control gets stronger and the workload gets smaller, which is unusual enough to be worth stating plainly.
Judgement calls on a small number of invoices, with the evidence already gathered.
Everything mechanical, on every invoice rather than on a sample.
Including the ones that cause arguments. We will run them live rather than describe what should happen.
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