Accounts Payable Automation
Pay what you owe, not what you were invoiced
Invoices arrive from every direction and are checked by hand against documents that live somewhere else. VapusFin reads each one, matches it against the purchase order, the goods receipt and the contract, and sends only the disagreements to a person.
The problem
The invoice is the easy part. Proving it is right is the work.
An invoice is a supplier's claim about what you bought and what it cost. Verifying that claim means finding the purchase order, finding the goods receipt, comparing line by line, checking the unit price against a contract signed two years ago, and confirming nobody has already paid it. Teams do that under a payment deadline, so the checks that get skipped are the ones that catch overbilling, price drift and the second copy of an invoice sent on a different reference. The money leaves quietly and never appears as a line item.
What it does
Inside Accounts Payable
Capture from wherever invoices land
Email attachments and inbox bodies, EDI feeds, supplier portal downloads, and scans or photographs of paper. Header fields and full line-item tables are extracted from each one, so matching has something to match on.
Line-item three-way matching
Each invoice line is matched to a purchase order line and a goods receipt line. Descriptions rarely agree word for word, so matching is fuzzy on text and exact on quantity, unit price and extended amount. A partial delivery matches the quantity received, not the quantity ordered.
Duplicate detection that survives disguise
Duplicates are found across variations in vendor name, amount, date and reference — the same invoice resubmitted under a new number, a scanned copy of one already paid by EDI, or a credit note applied twice. Comparison is on the substance of the document, not on the invoice number alone.
Price drift against contracted rates
Unit prices on the invoice are checked against the rate card in the master agreement, including tiered and volume-based pricing. A rate that has crept up since the last order is flagged with both figures and the clause it contradicts, so the conversation with the supplier starts with evidence.
Contract compliance checks
Payment terms, delivery obligations, permitted surcharges, freight treatment and tax handling are read from the master agreement and applied to every invoice under it. Charges the contract does not allow are held rather than paid and disputed later.
Early-payment discounts, before they expire
Discount terms are read off the invoice and the contract, the deadline is tracked against the approval queue, and eligible invoices are pushed forward so the window is not lost to a queue. Where a discount is missed, the reason is recorded.
Approval routing that reflects your delegation matrix
Route by amount, GL code, department, entity, cost centre or exception type. A clean invoice under a threshold takes a different path from a price variance on a capital project, and each approver sees only what they are being asked to decide.
Straight-through disbursement
Invoices that match cleanly and clear every check are scheduled for payment without a human touch, on the terms in the contract. Everything else is routed as an exception with the reason it stopped, the documents that disagree, and the field that caused it.
How it works
From arrival to posted entry
- 01
Capture
Invoices are collected from email, EDI, supplier portals and scans. Header fields, line items, tax and payment terms are extracted, with a confidence score on each field.
- 02
Enrich
The invoice is tied to its vendor master record, its purchase order, its goods receipts and the master agreement it falls under, so every later check has its reference document to hand.
- 03
Verify
Three-way matching runs line by line, alongside duplicate detection, contract-rate comparison, tax validation and vendor bank-detail checks. Each result records what was checked and against what.
- 04
Route
Clean invoices continue. Exceptions go to the approver responsible for that kind of exception, carrying the two conflicting values and the source documents, so the decision takes a look rather than an investigation.
- 05
Pay and post
Approved invoices are scheduled on contract terms, discount windows first, and posted back to your ERP with the full check history attached to the entry.
Questions
Frequently asked
- Does this replace our ERP's AP module?
- No. VapusFin sits in front of it. Invoices are captured, matched and approved in VapusFin, then posted into your ERP as they are today, with the check history attached. Your ledger, your vendor master and your payment runs stay where they are.
- What happens to an invoice that does not match?
- It stops and becomes an exception. The exception names the specific disagreement — quantity received against quantity billed, contracted rate against invoiced rate, a possible duplicate of a named earlier invoice — and shows both documents side by side. It is routed to whoever owns that exception type under your delegation matrix. Nothing is paid on the strength of a guess.
- Can it handle partial deliveries and consolidated invoices?
- Yes. Matching is at line level, so an invoice can be matched against several goods receipts, and a receipt can be split across several invoices. A line billed for more than has been received is held for the balance rather than the whole invoice being rejected.
- How does it know what our contracts say?
- Master agreements are loaded once and the commercial terms that affect an invoice — rate cards, payment terms, permitted surcharges, freight and tax handling — are extracted and linked to the vendor. Every contract check on an invoice points back to the clause it was drawn from, so an approver can read the source rather than take the result on trust.
- What accuracy should we expect?
- This will be stated once we have measured it against customer data, with the measurement method described. We would rather run your own historical invoices through a sandbox and show you the result on your documents than quote a figure from someone else's.
- How long does it take to go live?
- We scope this per deployment based on the number of source systems, entities and approval chains involved. The onboarding stages and their exit criteria are set out on the VapusFin overview page.
Run your own invoices through it
Send us a batch of historical invoices with the matching POs and receipts. We will process them in a sandbox and walk you through what matched, what did not, and why.
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