Supplier statement reconciliation automation

First decide which problem you are buying a fix for

A supplier statement and the company ledger describe the same events in different ways. A payment has been sent but not yet settled. A credit note carries a different reference. One amount covers several invoices. Comparing the totals will not explain any of this.

If collecting the files takes most of the time, the project is about getting and preparing the data. If people spend a long time looking for the links between items, you need record matching. When differences require contact with the supplier or another department, the work is exception handling. These scopes can be built in one project, but the quote lists them separately: otherwise the result is judged by the number of documents while the cost sits in the exceptions.

What supplier reconciliation automation costs and when it pays back

The count covers the work around a case: searching, reading, writing and passing things on. What stays is the time to check the result, 25% of today's work in this scenario. Before the quote we measure both times on 20 to 100 cases the team has already handled, in a free test that takes 5 working days.

The scenario assumes 150 reconciliations a month of 25 minutes each. A useful pilot result is a list of matching items, differences and the material to judge them, with a way back to the source for every item.

Where rules are enough and where the model helps

Identifiers, amounts, currencies and dates can be compared without ambiguity. A language model helps with an unusual item description or with reading a message, but it does not replace an arithmetic check. Before a build, check the features of your current finance system, because a module you already have may be enough. A match proposed by the system is no basis for changing the ledger or a payment: those actions have their own permissions. An electronic invoice does not reconcile every event with a supplier. You count the running cost per unit, for example per reconciled supplier, as FinOps describes.

Where to start

A pilot needs representative statements together with the company's entries, including the difficult suppliers, because picking only the easy ones distorts the result. Cost invoices are covered by cost invoice automation. We build this kind of system as part of our AI automations. For the free analysis, a description of one case from the last few weeks and the tools it went through is enough. You do not need to send confidential documents, and you get a written plan within 2 working days.