Accounts Payable: Automate Invoice Processing and Three-Way Matching

A mid-sized corporate group with 5 entities and 350 employees receives around 2,200 incoming invoices per month — from suppliers, service providers, subcontractors. Every invoice must be matched against the corresponding purchase order and goods receipt (three-way match) before payment approval.

Previously, this was a manual process: review the invoice, find the PO in the ERP, confirm goods receipt, clarify discrepancies, grant approval. With 2,200 invoices per month and a team of 4 accountants, this was a permanent bottleneck — early payment discounts were regularly missed.

Financial Data Requires Local Processing

Incoming invoices contain price and terms information that reveals purchasing conditions. The corporate group would not consider passing this to external services.

Automated Invoice Processing with SoverIQ

SoverIQ Stack is connected to the ERP and inventory management system — fully locally:

• Invoice extraction: vendor, amount, line items, VAT breakdown, due date from PDF or e-invoice
• Three-way match: automatic reconciliation invoice ↔ purchase order ↔ goods receipt
• Discrepancy classification: price variance? Quantity difference? Missing line item? — category and recommended action
• Approval routing: clean invoices straight to payment; query cases with prepared explanation to the accountant
• Early payment discount monitoring: invoices with discount options are prioritised

Results

80% of incoming invoices processed and approved fully automatically. Manual processing time per invoice fell from 8 to 1.5 minutes (exception-handling only). Early payment discount capture rose from 34% to 91% — equivalent to around €72,000 in annual savings from discounts alone on a purchasing volume of €12 million.