Invoice processing automation
- Net saving a month after the software
- $4,195
- Hours a month on payables today
- 220
- What that costs a month
- $7,040
Every figure here comes from the figures you enter and the method stated beside it: your invoice volume, your team's hourly cost, your own purchase-order coverage and your own tolerance. Where a worksheet uses a published constant it names the source and the date it was read. This site publishes no accounting treatment, no tax position and no audit opinion; what a transaction should be booked as is your accountant's and your auditor's.
Invoice processing automation is the work of turning a supplier invoice into a posted, approved, payable record without anybody retyping it. It covers capture, coding, the match against the order and the receipt, the exception queue when those three disagree, and the approval trail that ends in a payment. What it is not is a promise that nobody looks at anything: the point is that people look only at the invoices that need a person.
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Capture the invoice as data
The invoice arrives by email, portal or post and is read into fields: supplier, invoice number, date, lines, tax and total. Capture accuracy is what everything downstream inherits, so this is where the time is worth spending.
Match it against the order and the receipt
The captured invoice is matched to the purchase order and the goods receipt. Where all three agree within tolerance it can post without a person. Where they do not, it becomes an exception with the reason attached rather than an email.
Route what needs a decision
Exceptions and anything over a threshold go to the person who can resolve them, with the invoice, the order and the receipt on the same screen. The approval is recorded against the invoice with a name and a date, which is what an auditor asks for later.
Invoice processing automation: common questions
Does invoice processing automation mean nobody checks invoices? The opposite: it means people check the invoices that need checking. Everything that matches the order and the receipt within tolerance posts on its own, so attention goes to exceptions rather than to keying.
What share of invoices can post without a person? It depends almost entirely on how many of your invoices have a purchase order behind them. Invoices with no order cannot be matched and always need a human decision, so the PO coverage rate sets the ceiling before any software does.
What breaks first when this is introduced? Supplier data. Duplicate supplier records, inconsistent names and stale bank details produce matches that fail for reasons that have nothing to do with the invoice, and cleaning that list first saves months of frustration.
Will it do what you need for Invoice processing automation?
Tell us how your payables process runs today and what you are trying to get out of it.