Document-reading agent for accounts payable

The challenge

Accounts payable is the process where the cost of manual work is easiest to measure: somebody opens a supplier invoice, reads the numbers, types them into the ERP, and checks them against the purchase order and the goods received.

Rule-based automation fails here because no two suppliers lay out an invoice the same way, and the exceptions — a partial delivery, a price difference, a missing reference — are exactly the cases that matter.

What we built

The agent receives the document, extracts supplier, dates, references, line items, VAT and totals, and matches it against the open purchase orders and goods receipts in the ERP.

Where everything agrees within tolerance, it posts the document and logs what it read. Where it does not, it opens an exception with the difference stated in plain language and waits for a person.

It runs with least privilege — read access to the documents and the orders, write access only to the one table it must post to. Every action is auditable together with the evidence used to decide, and a fixed evaluation set is run on every change so quality can be measured instead of assumed.

Results

• Straight-through processing for the documents that match, review only for the ones that do not
• Every decision traceable to the evidence behind it
• Quality measured against a fixed evaluation set, not by impression