Accounts payable automation: how to stop handling each supplier invoice four times
How many times is a supplier invoice handled?
Take a supplier invoice for 1,850 euros that arrives by email. You forward it to your accounting tool, which reads it automatically, and then you look at it again to decide which account and cost centre it belongs to. It needs an approval from whoever ordered the service, so it goes to them by email or chat and comes back a few days later. When the payment goes out, you match the bank transaction to the invoice. At month-end, the same invoice goes into the export for your tax advisor, who looks at it once more when booking the month in DATEV.
That is one invoice handled four times: coded, approved, matched to its payment and booked again by the tax advisor, each time by a different person in a different tool. Card payments follow the same pattern: the expense management tool collects the receipts, the accounting tool imports them, and someone corrects the cost centre before the export.
Mistakes in that chain are expensive to undo, which is why one finance lead told us their team has a rule to prevent wrong postings: every invoice has to reach the status "invoice checked" before it reaches finance. Once an open item is created with the wrong account, fixing it means reversing the journal entry and posting it again.
Why is reading the invoice the easy part?
Most invoice automation software leads with capture, and for the header of an invoice it works well: supplier, amount, date and VAT are read reliably from a PDF. The line items are harder, and the same finance lead told us that line-item recognition works well for about half of their invoices and not at all for the rest. Reading is also becoming less of a problem over time. Since January 2025, every company in Germany has to be able to receive e-invoices, which carry their data in a structured, machine-readable format. From 2027, companies with more than 800,000 euros in previous-year revenue must also send them, and most other companies follow in 2028.
But even a perfectly read invoice still goes through the first three of the four touches, and that is where most of the time in payables goes. The first is coding, where deciding the account and the cost centre needs someone who knows how the company books things. One company told us the text recognition in their accounting tool misses the cost centres, so they are added by hand, and another finance lead summed up the experience in three words: coding is awful.
The second is approval, which usually runs through email or chat and is delayed whenever the approver is not available. The third is payment, which many invoice tools leave out. The payment is made in online banking, often through a payment file uploaded to the bank, and the invoice then has to be marked as paid. If the payment is matched to the invoice by hand, it turns into the slow, repetitive month-end matching that most finance teams know.
What does handling each invoice once look like?
Handling an invoice once means one flow from arrival to booking. The system reads the invoice and proposes how it should be booked, based on how similar invoices were booked before. It sends the invoice to the right approver in the same place, records the approval next to the invoice, and matches the payment when it goes out. At any moment, you can see which invoices are waiting for approval and which are ready to be paid.
How does Agent F handle supplier invoices?
Going back to our example, when the 1,850 euro invoice arrives in Agent F, it is read and comes with the account and cost centre suggested from how that supplier's invoices were booked before, each with a confidence score. It goes to the person who ordered the service for approval, and the approval is recorded on the invoice. Your finance team checks the suggestion before the invoice becomes an open item, so the posting is right from the start, which is the rule the finance lead mentioned above enforces by hand. For invoices that belong to a purchase order, the three-way match against the order and the goods receipt runs first.
Card payments from your expense management tool come in the same way, with the cost centre already suggested. Once the payment is made, it is matched to its invoice automatically, and your tax advisor receives the month's bookings through the DATEV export with every invoice already coded and approved. The accounts, cost centres and approvers are your own, because Agent F is configured to how your company works, through what we call the ERP Factory.
Which of the four touches takes your team the longest?
Learn how Agent F works, and book a demo at agent-f.ai/demo to see it run on your numbers.