Evaluations of invoice automation tools stretch for months and often answer less than a focused fortnight with real documents. Three tests, run on your own worst invoices rather than a vendor's samples, produce the information a decision actually needs, and all three are things a scripted demonstration is designed to avoid showing you.
Test one: review time on your own documents
Run a few hundred of your own invoices, including the ones your team complains about, and measure the human minutes still required afterwards. That number, multiplied by your volume, is the honest comparison against what you do today. Headline accuracy figures blend easy fields with hard ones and are not comparable.
Test two: what an exception looks like
Force a mismatch and look at what the team is shown. Does it carry the reason and the two numbers? Can it be routed to purchasing without leaving the record? Does it have an age? Products that look identical in a feature list diverge sharply here, and this is the screen your team will live in.
Test three: do nothing
Submit an invoice for approval and then leave it. Watch what happens when the approver does not respond, and what happens when they are marked absent. Delegation and escalation behaviour is where real elapsed time is won or lost, and it never appears in a demonstration because demonstrations do not wait.
Questions people ask about invoice automation tool
Is a fortnight really enough?
For these three questions, yes, provided the documents are yours and include the awkward ones. Longer evaluations mostly add feature comparison, which does not discriminate.
What should we ask about pricing?
The shape: per invoice, per user, per document, and what is included. Products with similar headline prices can differ several-fold at your actual volumes.
Do we need to involve purchasing?
Yes, because purchase-order coverage caps what any tool can deliver, and that is theirs.