Paying an invoice is the last and easiest step, and nearly everything that goes wrong happens before it. Five checks, in a specific order, prevent almost all of it, and each one is cheap before the money moves and expensive afterwards. Recovering a payment made to the wrong account or made twice is difficult in a way that checking beforehand is not.
Confirm and de-duplicate
The supplier exists in your records, the invoice is addressed to your legal entity, and this supplier and invoice number combination has not been seen before. These three catch accidental duplicates, invoices meant for another organisation, and the invoice from a supplier you have never used, which is the shape of the most common payables fraud.
Match, then approve
Compare with the purchase order and the goods receipt where they exist, and route anything outside tolerance to whoever can resolve it. Where there is no order, approval falls to whoever authorised the spend. Record the approval with the amount and the date, because that record is what an auditor and any future dispute will rely on.
Verify the bank details, then pay
If the payment details differ from the verified details you hold, stop. Verify through contact details you already have, not any supplied with the request, and have somebody other than the requester do it. Then pay on the agreed terms and send a remittance advice so the supplier can allocate it without telephoning you.
Questions people ask about how to pay invoice
What if we cannot match an invoice?
Do not pay it yet. Route it to whoever can establish what it is for. Paying unmatched invoices to keep a supplier happy is how organisations pay for goods that never arrived.
How do we avoid paying twice?
Check supplier and invoice number before payment, and watch for reissued invoices carrying a new number for the same goods, which that check alone will miss.
Should we pay early?
Only where a discount exceeds your cost of capital and the cash is available. Otherwise paying to terms is the default, and it should be a decision rather than an accident.