Accounts payable automation, from invoice to prepared posting

Reading the invoice, whatever form it arrives in

Invoices do not arrive in a tidy format. They come as PDFs attached to emails, as scans, through supplier portals, and occasionally as structured e-invoices. The first job of an AP automation is to turn all of that into clean, structured data: supplier, invoice number, date, line items, tax, totals, and payment terms. We use an LLM to read the document the way a person would, then run the extracted fields through validation before anything touches your ledger.

Reading is where accuracy is won or lost, so we do not trust a single pass. Extracted totals are checked against the sum of line items, tax is recomputed and compared, and the supplier is matched against your vendor master rather than taken at face value. When a field is ambiguous or a check fails, the invoice is flagged for a person instead of being pushed through on a guess. The model does the reading; the validation decides whether we trust it.

• Extract supplier, invoice number, dates, line items, tax, and totals from any format
• Recompute totals and tax to confirm the extraction is internally consistent
• Match the supplier against your vendor master to catch typos and duplicates
• Flag low-confidence or inconsistent invoices for human review, not silent posting

Two- and three-way matching against your POs

The core of AP control is matching: does this invoice correspond to a purchase order you actually raised, and to goods or services you actually received. We automate two-way matching (invoice to PO) and three-way matching (invoice to PO to goods receipt) by pulling the relevant records from your ERP or purchasing system through its API and comparing them line by line, applying the tolerances you set for price and quantity variance.

When everything matches within tolerance, the invoice is prepared for posting and moves toward approval. When it does not, the automation does not force it through; it holds the invoice and shows a person exactly what disagrees: a price above the PO, a quantity that exceeds what was received, a line with no matching order. That is the exception worth a human's attention, surfaced cleanly instead of hidden in a pile of routine invoices.

• Two-way matching of invoice to purchase order
• Three-way matching that also checks the goods or services were received
• Configurable price and quantity tolerances so minor variances do not stall the flow
• Clear exception detail when something does not match, routed to the right person

Preparing the posting, never releasing the payment

Once an invoice is read, validated, and matched, we prepare the posting: the correct GL accounts, cost centres, tax codes, and payment terms, coded according to your rules and written to your accounting system through its API. Duplicate detection runs here too, so the same invoice arriving twice does not become two payments. The work that used to be manual keying is done, accurately and traceably.

What we never automate is the release of funds. A payment always waits for a human to approve it, in your accounting system or banking portal, against a clean summary the automation prepares. That approval step is deliberate and non-negotiable: it is the control that stands between an efficient process and an expensive mistake. You decide who approves what and above which amounts; we make the approval fast and well-informed rather than removing it.

Audit trail, ownership, and honest limits

Every invoice that passes through carries a full trail: the original document, the extracted data, the match result, the validation checks, who approved it, and when. When an auditor asks about a payment, the evidence is one click away rather than a hunt through inboxes. This traceability is built in from the start, because in AP an unexplained payment is a problem, not a curiosity.

You own the whole build, running on your infrastructure and accounts, documented so your finance team can operate and adjust it. We will also be honest about scope: AP automation shines on high-volume, PO-backed invoices, and is less suited to one-off, judgement-heavy payments, which we are happy to leave with your team. We build the plumbing and the controls; the sign-off, and any regulated or tax judgement, stays with your finance professionals.