Accounts payable invoice automation

A finance clerk handling roughly twenty invoices a day at about four minutes of manual handling each is spending around five hours a week on work that requires almost no judgement. That is a full working day every fortnight, on keying.

The cost is not only the time. Manual AP is where duplicate payments happen. On five million pounds of annual payables, industry benchmarks put duplicate and overpayment leakage at roughly 0.5 to 1 percent, which is 25,000 to 50,000 pounds a year leaving the business by accident. Those are benchmark figures rather than a promise, but they are the reason this is usually the first automation worth doing.

Then there is the month-end pressure: invoices sitting unposted because nobody had time, so the numbers the board sees are wrong until someone catches up.

Ingest

The system watches your existing purchase invoice mailbox through Microsoft Graph. Nothing changes for your suppliers and no new portal is introduced. Email signature images and other non-invoice attachments are filtered out before extraction.

Extract

Azure Document Intelligence reads the invoice: supplier, invoice number, date, net, VAT, gross, line items and purchase order reference. It handles the PDFs suppliers actually send rather than a clean template.

Match

Fuzzy supplier matching against your Sage creditor ledger, then matching against the purchase order register in your hire or stock system. Amounts are checked to a defined tolerance, VAT rounding is handled, and duplicate invoice numbers are caught before they reach payment.

Route the exceptions

Anything the system is not confident about goes to a review queue with the document, the extracted values and the reason it stopped. A person makes the call. Rejected documents get their own review page rather than disappearing.

Post

Matched invoices are prepared for posting in the format your finance system expects, with a full named-user audit trail behind every decision.

• 80 to 90 percent of clean invoices auto-match. Your team touches the 10 to 20 percent that genuinely need judgement.
• Time to post falls from days to minutes. The ledger reflects reality when the board asks.
• Duplicates get caught before payment rather than during a supplier statement reconciliation months later.
• Every action is logged against a named user, which is what makes it auditable.

The worked example puts numbers against this on a typical invoice volume, and shows the arithmetic so you can substitute your own.

It can run self-hosted on a machine inside your network, so invoice and supplier data never leaves your environment, or in your own cloud tenant where you want remote access. That is a deliberate joint decision made at design, not a default we impose.

Either way you own it. There is no platform licence from us and no per-user fee, and the cloud running cost sits in your own subscription at your own rates rather than being marked up through us.

Fixed scope and a fixed fee, on 20/30/50 milestone terms. No platform licence from us, and you own the cloud tenant it runs in. Where the shape of the work is not yet clear we start with a fixed-price discovery that converts into the build price.