Supplier invoices read, matched to POs and queued for approval the day they arrive
A done-for-you invoice processing automation is an AI agent that BufferSol builds and runs inside your accounts payable stack. It reads every supplier invoice from email, portals and scans, extracts header and line data, checks it against purchase orders and goods receipts, catches duplicates and bank-detail changes, and routes clean bills to the right approver. Approved bills post to your ERP with a full audit trail. Exceptions go to your AP team with the reason written out.
- Live in 3 to 6 weeks
- Works inside your current tools
- Your people approve what matters
The outcome
What changes for your business
Invoices entered the day they land
Every invoice in the AP inbox is read, coded and matched within hours, so the payables ledger shows what you actually owe today.
Errors stopped before the payment run
Duplicates, price and quantity mismatches, and changed bank details are flagged before cash leaves the account, not discovered afterwards.
Clear answers for suppliers
Your team sees the status of any invoice in one place, so a supplier question takes a quick lookup instead of a search through inboxes.
Is this you?
Finance teams at mid-sized companies that receive hundreds or thousands of supplier invoices a month in mixed formats and still key most of them into NetSuite, QuickBooks, Sage Intacct, Dynamics or SAP by hand.
- Your AP inbox holds invoices nobody has opened yet, and some are already close to their due date.
- Approvers sign off by replying to email, and nobody can say where a given invoice is stuck.
- Duplicate payments get caught by the supplier, not by you.
- Suppliers email and call to ask when they will be paid, and someone has to dig for the answer.
- Month-end accruals are guesses because invoices for goods already received have not been entered.
Today vs done for you
The current way, and the new way
What your team does by hand today, and what the automation does instead, step by step.
How it works today
- An AP clerk opens the shared invoices mailbox, downloads each PDF or scan and renames it.
- They key vendor, invoice number, dates, line items, tax and totals into the ERP or accounting system.
- They look up the purchase order and the receiving record, often on another screen or in a warehouse spreadsheet, to check price and quantity.
- They pick GL codes and cost centers from memory or a cheat sheet.
- They email the budget owner for approval and chase the reply a few days later.
- Before the payment run, someone scans the batch by eye for duplicates and odd amounts.
What it quietly costs you
- · Skilled staff spend the week typing and chasing instead of working on vendor terms, accruals and cash planning.
- · Early-payment discounts lapse and late fees appear because invoices sit unopened or unapproved.
- · Fraud and duplicate checks depend on one busy person noticing a repeated invoice number or a new bank account.
How it works done for you
- The agent watches the AP mailbox, supplier portals and the scanned-mail folder, and picks up each invoice as it arrives, whatever the format.
- Document AI extracts vendor, invoice number, dates, currency, tax and every line, then checks that lines, tax and total add up.
- It matches lines to the purchase order and goods receipt in your ERP within the price and quantity tolerances finance sets, and proposes GL codes and cost centers from your own coding history.
- It checks for repeated invoice numbers, near-identical amounts from the same supplier, and any change to bank details against the vendor master.
- Clean, matched invoices go to the approver your policy names, in Slack, Teams or email, with the PO and receipt attached and a one-click approve or query.
- Approved bills post to the ERP. Exceptions land in a review queue with the reason spelled out, such as a price variance, a missing receipt or an unknown vendor.
- Every read, match, decision and approval is logged with a timestamp, so an auditor can trace any bill back to its source document.
Your people
What changes for your team
AP clerk
Today
Keys invoices, hunts for purchase orders and chases approvers by email.
Done for you
Works the exception queue, settles variances with buyers and keeps the vendor master clean.
AP manager or controller
Today
Reviews payment batches line by line and answers supplier calls about status.
Done for you
Releases payment runs from a pre-checked batch, sets tolerances and watches exception trends by vendor.
Budget owner
Today
Gets long email threads asking them to approve PDFs with no context.
Done for you
Approves in chat with the PO, the receipt and the budget remaining shown next to the invoice.
The numbers
What it's worth to you
Estimate the time and cost you get back with your own numbers. We baseline the real figures in week 1 and track these KPIs from day one.
Example inputs · change them to yours
The automated share covers invoices that match a PO or a known recurring vendor and need no human edit; exceptions still go to your team.
Staff time back
113 hours a month
About 0.7 full-time people freed for higher-value work
Capacity reclaimed a month
$3,938
A year
$47,250
An estimate from your inputs only. In week 1 we measure your real baseline, so results are tracked against your own numbers.
Invoice cycle time
Time from arrival in the inbox to approved for payment, baselined from ERP and mailbox timestamps for the quarter before go-live.
Touchless rate
Share of invoices that post with no manual edit, reported weekly by vendor and entity.
Exception rate and reasons
Count of invoices sent to review, grouped by reason, so recurring supplier problems can be fixed at the source.
Cost per invoice
AP staff hours divided by invoices processed, compared with the month before launch.
Duplicates and bad payments stopped
Number and value of invoices held for duplicate or bank-change checks and confirmed as problems by a reviewer.
Discounts captured and late fees paid
Tracked from payment terms and vendor statements, month over month.
$12.88 vs. $2.78
17.4 days vs. 3.1 days
79%
Works with the tools you already use
- NetSuite
- QuickBooks Online
- Sage Intacct
- Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central
- SAP S/4HANA
- Outlook and Microsoft 365
- Gmail
- Slack
- Microsoft Teams
- Azure Document Intelligence
Guardrails built in
- The agent never pays anyone. It prepares and posts bills; payment runs stay with people who hold payment authority.
- Approval limits and segregation of duties follow your existing delegation-of-authority matrix.
- Any change to supplier bank details is held until a person confirms it by phone using the number already on file.
- Every extracted field links back to its place in the source document, and every action is logged for audit.
- Documents stay in your own cloud tenant and are not used to train third-party models.
Why it hurts today
What teams say about this work
Common complaints from operators, reviewers and industry research.
A survey of more than a thousand mid-market finance professionals ranked invoice coding and data entry as the most tedious AP task, followed by invoice approvals and matching invoices to purchase orders.
Reviewers of an established AP platform still describe indexing mistakes such as the wrong amount or vendor, invoices sent to the wrong department for approval, and approvals that take too many steps.
Treasury and finance practitioners name business email compromise as the leading route for payments fraud, and vendor impersonation is rising, which puts every bank-detail change in the AP inbox under suspicion.
AP teams outside the best-in-class group spend roughly twice as much staff time answering supplier questions about invoice and payment status.
How it works
From kickoff to live in 3 to 6 weeks
We do the build, the integrations and the rollout. Your team gives us access, reviews the pilot and approves go-live.
- 1
Week 1
Discovery and access
We map the workflow with your team, agree the outcomes and KPIs, measure today's baseline and get secure access to your tools.
- 2
Weeks 2–3
Build and connect
We build the agents and connect your systems, with your rules, approval steps, permissions and logging.
- 3
Weeks 3–5
Test and pilot
We test on your real history, then run a pilot on live work while your team reviews what the agent does.
- 4
Weeks 4–6
Go live and hand over
We roll out in stages, train your team, hand over dashboards and runbooks, and keep improving it with you.
Included with every automation
Executive Ask: ask your business anything
One plain-English assistant connected to the systems you run: CRM, helpdesk, ERP and accounting, HR, inbox and documents. Leaders get sourced answers in seconds and can trigger actions with approval. It respects everyone's existing permissions and logs every answer.
See Executive AskAsk it, for example
- Which invoices over the approval limit are still waiting, and who is holding them?
- How much do we owe suppliers this week, and which early-payment discounts expire before Friday?
- Which vendors sent the most invoices that failed PO matching this month, and why?
Invoice Processing (Accounts Payable): questions
Straight answers to what clients ask us most.
Ask our teamHow long does it take to go live?
Most AP automations are live in 3 to 6 weeks. The first week covers your approval matrix, tolerances, coding rules and a sample of real invoices. We then connect the mailbox and ERP, run the agent in shadow mode next to your team so you can compare its output with theirs, and switch it on vendor group by vendor group once finance signs off.
How much does it cost?
We quote after a short scoping call. The price depends on invoice volume, how many entities and ERPs are involved, whether you need PO matching or only non-PO coding, and which approval channels you use. You get a fixed written quote covering design, build, connections, deployment and configuration before any work starts, with no obligation to go ahead.
Does it handle invoices without a purchase order?
Yes. Utilities, rent, subscriptions and services usually arrive without a PO. For those, the agent codes the invoice from your history with that supplier, checks it against contract amounts or the last few bills, and sends it to the budget owner for approval. Anything outside the usual pattern for that vendor goes to the review queue with the difference explained.
Will the AI pay suppliers on its own?
No. The agent prepares, matches, routes and posts bills. Releasing payments stays with the people in your company who hold payment authority, in your bank portal or payment tool. The agent can prepare a proposed payment batch with due dates and available discounts, but a person reviews and releases it. That separation is deliberate and auditors expect it.
Have you built this before?
Yes. BufferSol delivered an invoice-to-pay workflow for a finance team that keyed hundreds of supplier invoices by hand each month from PDFs, scans and emails. The agent watches the invoices inbox, extracts every field with document AI, matches lines to purchase orders, flags mismatches and duplicates, routes approvals in Slack and posts approved invoices to QuickBooks. Manual keying was removed and duplicates were caught before payment.
What happens when the agent is unsure about a field?
It does not guess. Each extracted field carries a confidence score, and anything below the threshold you set is highlighted on the invoice image for a person to confirm. Corrections are saved as examples for that supplier, so the same layout reads correctly next time. Low-confidence invoices never post automatically, even if the rest of the match looks clean.
Pairs well with
Document Intake & Data Extraction
Bills of lading, packing slips and forms read straight into your systems
See the outcomeSupplier & Vendor Follow-Up
Every open PO confirmed, chased and dated without inbox hunting
See the outcomeMonth-End Close & Reconciliation
Accounts reconciled every night, so close week is review instead of rework
See the outcomeSources
- Here are the Four Most Tedious Tasks in Accounts Payable, MineralTree
- AvidXchange Reviews (328), G2
- Survey: 79% of Organizations Were Victims of Attempted or Actual Payments Fraud Activity in 2024, Association for Financial Professionals (AFP)
- The State of ePayables 2024: Money Never Sleeps, Ardent Partners (hosted by Bottomline)
Get Invoice Processing done for you
Tell us about your volumes and tools. A senior engineer replies within one business day with scope, timeline and cost.
Live in 3 to 6 weeks · Priced after a short call · Company emails only