Automating Vendor Invoice Processing

The industry and its realities

The manufacturer receives a high, steady volume of vendor invoices related to sourcing raw materials and production parts, spread across dozens of vendors. Processing these invoices relied on manual entry and a visual reconciliation between the invoice, the purchase order, and the receiving note.

The client’s intent and need

The accounts payable team wanted to reduce time spent on manual entry and verification, while lowering the risk of matching errors and the loss of early-payment discounts caused by processing delays that ran too long.

How Nord Numérique addressed the need

Nord Numérique designed and delivered an automated vendor invoice processing workflow, integrated into the ERP system already in place, rather than an additional standalone tool to operate in parallel.

The steps taken to define the solution

• End-to-end mapping of the current process, from invoice receipt through to payment.
• Defining three-way matching rules (purchase order, receipt, invoice) and tolerance thresholds.
• Designing the exception-handling workflow and approval thresholds by amount tier.
• Analyzing the existing ERP's integration capabilities.

Implementing the solution

The solution automatically captures data from each incoming invoice, performs three-way matching against the order and receipt data already in the ERP, and automatically routes it for the appropriate approval based on amount. Invoices with an out-of-tolerance discrepancy are routed to a manually handled exceptions queue, rather than blocking the entire workflow. Validated invoices are then automatically posted in the ERP.

Challenges encountered

Variability in invoice formats across vendors required continuous tuning of the automated capture during the first few weeks. Integrating with a legacy ERP with limited data exchange capabilities also required specific adaptation work. The most delicate change was organizational: evolving the accounts payable team's role from repetitive entry toward exception handling.

Technical, organizational, and legal impacts

The delivered solution and its added value

The automated capture, three-way matching, exception handling, and posting workflow delivered a 40% reduction in administrative processing time for vendor invoices, with a shorter, more predictable payment cycle.

Measuring client satisfaction

The shorter processing time recovered some of the early-payment discounts previously lost, and the accounts payable team reported a more sustainable workload despite a stable invoice volume.