The situation
A finance team receives around 3,000 supplier invoices a month — by email, portal and the occasional PDF photographed at an angle. Each one needs reading, matching to a purchase order, coding to the right account and cost centre, and checking for the classics: duplicates, price variances, quantity mismatches. Two people spend most of their week on it. They are good at it. It is also nobody’s idea of a career.
The old options
Buy AP-automation software — another licence, another system for the team to operate, and the team still owns the work. Or outsource to a processing bureau and lose control of the exceptions, which are the part that actually matters. Either way, the work stays managed by you.
What we’d deploy
This is Service as Software: the firm doesn’t buy a tool — it buys the work, done. EBI deploys and runs an agent that:
- Reads every inbound invoice, whatever the format, and extracts the data with line-level accuracy checks
- Matches to purchase orders and goods-receipts in the ERP; codes to account and cost centre using the firm’s own rules
- Flags exceptions — duplicates, price variances, missing POs — into a queue for the humans, with the evidence attached
- Prepares the payment-run file for a human to approve; the agent never moves money
- Logs every action for audit, and gets supervised, measured and improved by EBI’s engineers — that’s what managed means
The deployment
Define the service and its success measures with the finance lead — volumes, accuracy thresholds, what always goes to a human. The agent goes live on a recent month of real invoices first, so its accuracy is measured against known results before it touches live work. Live, with human checkpoints, in weeks.
The economics
A simple subscription from £1,500 a month on annual terms — no platform fees, no per-seat licences. Against the fully-loaded cost of the manual processing it absorbs, the comparison is short. Every month, the firm gets the numbers: invoices processed, match rate, exceptions raised and resolved, turnaround time, and hours returned to the team.
Month three
The two finance people own the exceptions queue and the supplier relationships — the judgement work — and the keying is gone. Month-end accruals are ready on day one because the backlog never builds. The monthly report goes to the FD unedited, because the numbers are the service.