AI for Accounts Payable
ChatFin agents extract invoices, match to purchase orders, code to GL, route for approval, and schedule payments on your existing ERP. 80 to 88% of invoices processed touchlessly at steady state.
Every AP step from invoice to payment
Invoices received via email, portal, or EDI. Vendor name, amount, line items, PO number, and payment terms extracted at 99.2% field accuracy. No manual data entry.
Invoice matched to purchase order and goods receipt in your ERP. Quantity, price, and terms validated. Tolerances applied per your policy. Discrepancies flagged with specific mismatch detail.
Invoice line items coded to GL account, cost center, department, and project using vendor history and line item description. Coding accuracy improves monthly from your approvals.
Invoices routed for approval based on your authorization matrix: by amount, vendor, cost center, or expense category. Approvers notified via email or native ERP workflow.
Approved invoices scheduled for payment based on due dates, early payment discount opportunities, and cash position. DPO managed as an active lever, not an afterthought.
Open AP aging, approval queue, exception log, and payment schedule available in real time from your ERP. AP performance metrics tracked weekly: touchless rate, cycle time, cost per invoice.
AP that processes itself.
What AP teams achieve in 90 days
From manual AP to 88% touchless in 4 to 6 weeks
Map your AP workflow
ChatFin audits your invoice sources, vendor master data, PO structure, approval matrix, and ERP AP configuration. Automation scorecard at end of week two.
Connect and configure agents
ERP AP module connected. OCR extraction configured for your invoice formats. Matching tolerances and GL coding rules set. First batch run in parallel with existing process.
Touchless rate improves monthly
Agents go fully live. Touchless rate starts at 60 to 70% and improves to 80 to 88% by month three as the coding engine learns from your approvals. AP team handles exceptions only.
What should reach a person.
The useful test of AP automation is not how much it processes, it is what it escalates. An exception queue that grows is a system moving work rather than removing it. Everything on the right is a lookup, and if it is arriving in a queue the lookup has not been done.
Payment stays a human decision
An AP agent can capture, match and code an invoice without anyone touching it. Releasing the payment is where a person still needs to look.
The AgentCFO podcast conversations were blunt about accountability: responsibility for a payment stays with a person, and pointing at the software is not an answer anyone accepts once the money has left.
Decide in advance which exceptions reach a person, such as new vendors, changed bank details and amounts over a threshold, and let the agent handle the rest.
“Even if you are pulling all the values by scanning an invoice, how do you know if that number is correct? Sometimes a four can be read as a six. There should be a checkpoint where AI can say, I am not sure about this number, can you check?”
Where to start, and why that order
The sequence matters more than the tooling. Steps that need write access stall waiting on approvals, while read only steps produce evidence you can act on. The step that changes what gets posted comes last, once the read only steps have established whether the precedent is trustworthy.
Classify one month of the AP mailbox
Read only. It changes nothing and it usually reframes what the team believes its workload is, because most of what lands in the mailbox was never an invoice.
Compare bank details on the next payment run
One join against payment history. It is the check with the worst consequence when it is missing, and it runs before release rather than after.
Split the open orders, then validate approvers
Received and not invoiced is a real unrecorded liability. Administrative residue inflates the file and hides it. Stale approvers are the largest single cause of aged items.
Where AP actually breaks
Accounts payable divides into jobs that fail for different reasons and need different treatment. A team that fixes intake and leaves the payment run untested has improved throughput and not touched its largest single exposure. Each page below covers one of them.
Intake, two way and three way matching, and the invoices with no purchase order behind them.
Read moreApproval routing and GL coding, and why routing rules fail on stale references rather than logic.
Read moreReading open orders and goods receipts to find the invoices that never arrived.
Read moreSorting vendor mail from invoices, and answering payment questions from the ledger.
Read moreTesting the payment file before release, starting with changed vendor bank details.
Read moreVendor bank detail changes, duplicate payments and payees that match employee accounts.
Read moreReading the AP aging by cause, and what actually moves days payable outstanding.
Read morePurchase order coverage, tolerance settings, and why most match failures are timing.
Read moreAccounts payable AI, answered
What can AI actually do in accounts payable?
It reads the documents and ledgers you already have, answers the questions that have determinate answers, and escalates the ones that need a decision. That means classifying what arrived before extracting it, resolving matches against purchase orders and goods receipts, proposing GL coding from your own history, and testing a payment file before release. It does not post to the ledger or release payments unattended.
Is this better OCR?
No, and extraction accuracy is largely a solved problem. It is not what stalls an invoice. A perfectly extracted statement is still not an invoice, a perfectly extracted duplicate is still a duplicate, and a perfectly extracted invoice with no purchase order still has no approver. The work is classification and lookup rather than reading the page.
Why do three way matches fail so often?
Mostly on timing and units rather than on price. The goods receipt lands in a later period, three partial deliveries sit against one invoice line, or the order is in cases while the invoice is in each. Summing partial receipts and normalising units of measure resolves most of them before anything needs to reach a person.
What happens to invoices with no purchase order?
Cost centre, account and approver are proposed from what was actually done with that vendor and that cost centre before, with the prior invoices shown behind the proposal. A person releases it. Where the chart of accounts is genuinely ambiguous, history reproduces the ambiguity rather than resolving it.
What is the highest value check before a payment run?
Comparing each payee's bank details to the details last successfully paid. Changed banking instructions are the highest consequence event in accounts payable, the change is already visible in your payment history, and the check is rarely automated. It is a comparison rather than a judgement, which is why it can run on every payment file.
Do we need to replace our ERP?
No. The agents connect to the ERP you already run. Read access to the ledger, the purchase orders, the goods receipts and the AP mailbox is enough to produce the first results, and nothing is written back at that stage.
Where should a team start?
With the steps that need read access only, in this order: classify one month of the AP mailbox, compare bank details on the next payment run, split the open purchase order file into received and not invoiced against administrative residue, then validate approvers against current people data. The step that changes what gets posted comes last.
Related reading
The top AI platforms for AP automation compared on touchless rate, ERP integration, and deployment time.
Read articleHow the established AP platforms compare against agent based automation on matching, coding and exception handling.
Read articleHow to deploy AP automation on your existing ERP without replacing your process.
Read articleYour AP team should be managing vendor relationships, not processing invoices.
When 88% of invoices process themselves, the AP team handles the 12% that require judgment: disputed invoices, new vendors, policy exceptions. That is a more valuable AP function, at lower cost per invoice.
Full AP lifecycle: extraction, 3-way match, GL coding, approval routing, payment scheduling
Native ERP write-back. Standard AP transactions. Full audit trail.
80 to 88% touchless by month three. 74% cost per invoice reduction.
Works on NetSuite, SAP, JDE, Dynamics 365, Acumatica, Sage Intacct.