Four jobs, not one
“Invoice automation” blurs four separate things. Capture pulls the data off the document. Matching reconciles it against a purchase order and a delivery. Approval routes it to whoever must say yes. Posting writes it into the ledger.
Capture is close to solved. Matching and approval are where the money and the difficulty are, because they encode how your business actually makes decisions.
What we build
- Mailbox and scanner intake, so invoices arrive however suppliers send them
- Extraction with per-field confidence, not a single overall score
- Three-way matching with tolerances you set, in pounds and percentages
- Approval routed by amount, category and supplier — your real rules, not the policy document
- Escalation when an approval sits, because that is where late payment actually comes from
- Posting into your accounting package with the source document attached
Tolerances are a business conversation
Set them too tight and you have recreated the manual process. Too loose and the control is theatre. We ask you to decide, in pounds, and we make them changeable by your finance team rather than by us.
The exceptions we scope for
- Credit notes and negative amounts
- Multi-currency, and which system owns the rate
- Partial deliveries and partial invoicing
- Suppliers who invoice in a different unit from the one you order in
- Duplicates, which are more common than most finance teams expect
- Invoices with no purchase order at all
Rollout that does not frighten finance
Shadow mode for a month: the system processes everything, posts nothing, and a person compares. You learn your real accuracy rather than the brochure figure, and finance gets to trust it before it touches the ledger.
Then live by supplier, starting with your ten highest-volume ones. The long tail comes last.