Accounts Payable (AP) departments have thousands of invoices that need to be processed every month. In order to avoid unauthorized spending and duplicate or fraudulent payments to vendors, they have to manually comb through purchase orders, invoices, and receipts to match them. This time and resource-draining invoice matching process is highly essential for accounts payable operations to run smoothly.
What is 2-Way Invoice Matching?
2-way invoice matching requires matching a submitted invoice to a pre-approved purchase order. This is a default matching technique used by most businesses. Once the invoice details are extracted, they are automatically matched and verified against pre-defined purchase order details. This ensures that the vendor has billed the authorized amount before payment is processed.
What is 3-Way Invoice Matching?
3-way invoice matching goes an extra step to match the submitted invoice with the purchase order and the order receipt. In a 3-way match, the invoice details are first matched against the purchase order details. If the invoice passes this PO verification, it is further matched with the order receipt fields to verify if the quantity billed in the invoice actually matches what was delivered. 3-way invoice matching is becoming the standard as it offers more protection from any fraudulent or incorrect payments to the vendor.
What is 4-Way Invoice Matching?
In an effort to make invoice payments even more secure, some businesses use 4-way invoice matching too. This adds another layer of verification where the invoice is matched against the purchase order, order receipt, and inspection data. The delivered goods or services are internally inspected and a report is submitted. AP departments then match the vendor’s receipt and invoice against the inspection report to validate the correct delivery.
How Intelligent Invoice Matching Works
Infrrd for Invoice is an AI and ML-powered Intelligent Document Processing solution that has Intelligent Invoice Matching capability. Accounts Payable departments can automate 2-way, 3-way, and unlimited invoice matching seamlessly with no coding necessary.
Infrrd for Invoice has pre-configured business rules for invoice matching. Let’s take a look at how it works.
Extraction
First, Infrrd for Invoice accurately extracts important data (such as line items, codes, quantities, amounts, etc.) from your invoices for matching.
Unlimited Invoice Matching
Infrrd for Invoice is easily configured to handle the above-mentioned 2-way, 3-way, and 4-way matching that most AP departments have begun to adopt into their standard practice. But looking beyond today’s needs, Infrrd knows that change and unexpected complexity is always on the horizon. As businesses vary and evolve, invoices may need to be matched with any number of other internal or external documents in order to validate them for payment. Through its custom business rules, Infrrd for Invoice can be easily configured to match details from an unlimited number of documents and report the level of match for each, in the same way as 2- 3- and 4-way matching.
Decision-Making
Vendors make mistakes too. With Intelligent Invoice Matching, you can configure the invoice processing queue to review invoices that are not a perfect match but are very close. This can also help in detecting duplicate or fraudulent invoices.
Review & Approval Made Easy
Automating invoice matching with Infrrd for Invoice enables accounts payable departments to automate approvals for invoices that accurately match. Faster, automated payments to vendors free up time to follow up with invoices that need more verification or correction, reducing the risk of overpayments or duplicate payments.
Originally published at https://www.infrrd.ai.
