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AI agents for investigating invoice discrepancies
Short answer
For an invoice discrepancy, an AI agent sets the invoice, the purchase order, the goods receipt and the supplier's emails side by side, points to the document that may explain the difference and writes the accounts payable employee a specific question for the warehouse. It changes no quantities in the system. The agent costs from €3,000 net at Syntalith and, with 400 invoice discrepancies a month at 15 minutes each, pays back in 1.2 months.
How we workDetails ↓
- 01Call30 minutes with an engineer, free
- 02PrototypeA working system on your process and data, free
- 03ImplementationTarget and fixed price in the contract; 50% at signing
- 04Acceptance50% once the agreed target is met
- net per agent for one process, build paid once
- from €3,000
- from signing the contract to acceptance
- 6–16 weeks
- free prototype on your cases
- €0
We belong to the OpenAI and Anthropic partner programmes and learn through their official courses. What this means ↓
Author: Syntalith · 3 min read
Statistics
Invoices and AI: statistics 2026
1.2 mo.
payback of a €3,000 agent with 400 invoice discrepancies a month: €3,490 of work today, €1,059 with checking and the model. Scenario.
18 bn
According to the European Commission (2023), around 18 billion invoices are issued in the EU every year.
Source: European Commission, proposal COM(2023) 533 on late payment (2023) ↗
−87%
According to Anthropic (2025), AI cuts the time of a task on invoices, memos and other documents by an estimated 87%.
Source: Anthropic, Estimating AI productivity gains (2025) ↗
14–56%
According to Anthropic (2025), controlled trials found smaller time savings, from 14% to 56%.
Source: Anthropic, Estimating AI productivity gains (2025) ↗
46.5%
According to Eurostat (2025), 46.5% of EU enterprises with at least 10 employees used ERP software.
Source: Eurostat, Digital economy and society statistics, enterprises (2025) ↗
Figures checked: 22 October 2026
What happened to the other packs
A company ordered ten packs of goods and received an invoice for ten. The warehouse system shows a goods receipt for six. An email from the supplier holds a document describing a second delivery of four packs. The accounts payable employee sees a difference of four units, but without that email asks the warehouse about the whole delivery, waits for an answer and only then looks further.
The agent finds the supplier's document and writes a question: „The invoice and the purchase order cover ten packs, while the system shows a goods receipt for six. The supplier's email holds a document for a second delivery of four packs. Did the warehouse receive that delivery?”. It attaches links to the receipt and the email, so the warehouse operative checks a specific batch. The supplier's document helps ask the question, and it does not prove that the warehouse received four packs. When the warehouse operative replies, the agent attaches the explanation to the case, and the next person does not start with the same question.
- 01Differencethe invoice, the purchase order and the goods receipt side by side
- 02Documentsthe supplier's emails and attachments about this line
- 03Questiona specific request to the warehouse with links
- 04Replythe warehouse's explanation on the case
- 05Decisionthe person responsible for the invoice workflow decides what happens next
An email from the same supplier may describe a different delivery. When the agent is not sure that a document concerns the same order line, it shows it as a possible lead.
What it costs and when it pays back
- Today
- 400 invoice discrepancies × 15 min = 100 h (€3,490)
- With the system, a person checks the output in 30% of the time
- €1,047
- Model, 2 calls per case, Claude Sonnet 5.5
- €12
- Cost of one case
- €8.73 today, €2.65 with the system
- Saving
- €2,431 a month
Payback of €3,000
1.2 months
The volume, the time and the checking share are the scenario's assumptions. €34.90 an hour is the EU average hourly labour cost for 2025 according to Eurostat. Model: 6,000 input and 500 output tokens per call at Anthropic's rates, converted at the ECB rate of 1.1205 USD per euro on 22 October 2026.
The count covers the work around a case: searching, reading, writing and passing things on. What remains is the time to check the output, 30% of today's work in the scenario. Before the quote we measure both times on 20 to 100 cases the team has already handled, in a €0 test that takes 5 working days.
When your current system is enough
An accounting or warehouse system often already matches the invoice with the purchase order and the goods receipt and flags a mismatch. If the receipt is in the system and the employee easily finds it and links it to the invoice, your current workflow is enough. When the problem comes from a misread invoice, fix the reading. An agent makes sense when the explanation regularly takes you outside the system: finding an attachment in the inbox, a conversation about the second delivery and the warehouse's reply.
The system matches invoice and receipt and shows the documents
your current workflow
no build
Errors come from misread invoices
better invoice reading
automation
Explanations need email and questions to the warehouse
an agent that gathers documents and questions
from €3,000
Where to start
The first scope covers quantity discrepancies in one purchasing workflow. On a finished case we check whether the agent found the same document the employee found by hand. We build this as part of AI agents. For the free process review, a description of one case from recent weeks and the tools it ran through is enough. You do not need to send confidential documents, and you get a written plan within 2 working days.
Worked example · Scenario
How we count the payback: cost invoices
We run the same count for your invoices in the free process review.
€1,745
a month for coding 1,000 cost invoices by hand
Payback: 2 mo.
3 minutes per invoice and checking in 15% of the old time are our assumptions. €34.90 an hour is the EU average hourly labour cost for 2025 according to Eurostat, for companies with 10 or more employees. We measured the model cost of €0.004 per invoice in our invoice coding system, converted at the ECB rate of 1.1205 USD per euro on 22 October 2026.
See the full calculation →
