01 / Finance
Supplier invoice matching, automated end to end
Every supplier invoice is read, checked against its purchase order and delivery note, and booked for payment without anyone retyping it. Your team only sees the invoices that do not match.
- 80–90%
- of invoices booked with no manual touch
- 0
- duplicate payments, caught at intake
- Minutes
- from arrival to booked, instead of days
02 / The problem
Supplier invoices arrive as e-invoices, PDFs, scans and email bodies, in every layout imaginable. Someone has to open each one, find the order it belongs to, check that quantities and prices agree with what was ordered and delivered, and type it into the accounting system.
At a few hundred invoices a month that is days of work, and it is error-prone in exactly the places that cost money: duplicate payments, missed early-payment discounts and price increases nobody agreed to.
03 / How it runs
How it runs
Invoice arrives
RulesA dedicated mailbox, a supplier portal export or your scanner drops invoices into the pipeline. Duplicates are caught here by supplier and invoice number.
Read the invoice
RulesXRechnung and ZUGFeRD files are parsed directly. PDFs are read with an OCR template per supplier, so each field is taken from the same place every time.
Three-way match
RulesLines are matched against the purchase order and the delivery note with the tolerances you set for quantity and price. Anything outside tolerance stops here.
Review the exceptions
Your decisionMismatches go to the right person with the invoice, the order and the difference side by side. One click approves, rejects or asks the supplier.
Book and schedule payment
RulesMatched invoices are booked to the right account and cost centre and scheduled to catch any early-payment discount. Every decision is written to the audit log.
Rules first, AI only where it helps
Invoice matching is a rules problem: the same supplier sends the same layout, and an order either matches or it does not. Doing it with templates and tolerances means the result is identical every time and every decision can be explained to an auditor. We only add AI for a supplier whose documents no template can read, and that step is marked and reviewed.
04 / What we need from you
What we need from you
- Read access to purchase orders and goods receipts (ERP, inventory system or a spreadsheet)
- Write access to your accounting system, or an export format it imports
- Your matching tolerances and who approves what
Timeline
Live for your top suppliers within a week; new suppliers are added as templates in hours.
Works with
- DATEV
- Xero
- QuickBooks
- SAP Business One
- Outlook
- Gmail
- XRechnung / ZUGFeRD
For
05 / Questions
Questions
Does this work with German e-invoices (XRechnung, ZUGFeRD)?
Yes. Structured e-invoices are parsed directly from their XML, with no OCR involved, which makes them the fastest and most reliable path.
What happens with a supplier we have never seen?
The invoice goes to review with the fields that could be read. Once approved, we add a template for that supplier so the next one is automatic.
Can we keep approval rules by amount or cost centre?
Yes. Approval routing is part of the configuration: by amount, cost centre, supplier or any combination.
06 / Related automations
Related automations
More use cases in Finance
Want this running for you?
Book a demo and we will walk through how this would work with your tools.