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Solution · Finance & accountingFrom the inbox to the ERP without anyone retyping a number
Invoice processing without manual data entry
Every supplier invoice is read, validated, matched and posted automatically; your accounts payable team only sees the exceptions.
Executive summary
Stop paying your finance team to move numbers from PDFs into the ERP.
Nothing new needs buying: the end-to-end invoice flow we design and deliver runs on the UiPath Platform and Microsoft 365 that you already own.
Handling time per invoice falls from minutes to seconds for the matched majority; people work only on the exception share.
SAP S/4HANA (MIRO/BAPI); SharePoint audit archive; UiPath Insights
Business problem
Accounts payable
Supplier invoices arrive in every possible form: PDFs by email, scans from the plant reception, XML from a handful of large suppliers, and paper that someone photographs with a phone. All of them end in the same place, a person reading a document and typing its contents into the ERP. The work is monotonous, error-prone and impossible to speed up without hiring.
The cost is not only the typing. Each invoice that needs a purchase order, a goods receipt or an approval starts a small investigation: who ordered this, was it delivered, which cost centre pays. That investigation runs over email and Teams chats and nobody can see where an invoice is at any moment. Suppliers call to ask about payment status, and the AP team spends part of the day answering questions instead of processing.
At month end the backlog becomes a closing problem. Unposted invoices mean accruals estimated by hand, early-payment discounts missed, and an audit trail that lives partly in mailboxes. When volumes grow with the business, the only lever the AP manager has is more people, which is exactly the lever the CFO does not want to pull.
How it works today
The process below is what we find in most companies before automation, whatever the ERP.
- PersonAn AP clerk opens the shared mailbox, downloads attachments and saves them to a network folder named by month
- WaitingInvoices wait in the folder until someone has time, typically one to three working days
- PersonThe clerk reads each PDF and types header and line data into SAP MIRO, looking up the vendor and the PO manually
- Risk of errorDuplicates, wrong VAT codes and invoices for undelivered goods are caught late, at the payment run or not at all
- PersonInvoices without a PO are emailed to a cost centre owner for approval; reminders follow after a week
- WaitingApproved invoices return by email and are posted in a second pass, often after the payment run has closed
- PersonSupplier statements and payment questions are answered from memory and from searching the mailbox
Why the current process costs more than it appears
The most expensive part of this process has no cost line.
- The typing is only the visible part. Each invoice with a missing PO, a price difference or a wrong legal entity triggers an investigation of ten to thirty minutes that no one records anywhere.
- Late postings distort the month-end picture: accruals are estimated, cash forecasts are wrong by the value of what is still sitting in the folder, and early-payment discounts expire unused.
- Errors are expensive in a way budgets never show. A duplicate payment is recovered after months of correspondence; a wrong tax code is found by the tax adviser; a missed intercompany invoice is found by the auditor.
- Knowledge sits in two heads. When the experienced clerk is on holiday, the backlog doubles and supplier calls increase because nobody else knows which invoices are stuck and why.
- The team cannot be scaled up or down with volume. Growth means recruiting, seasonality means overtime, and every new ERP release means retraining.
Cost of inaction
Each month the backlog returns, the next volume increase is answered with a hire or overtime, and every ERP upgrade means another round of retraining. The invisible costs continue as well: discounts expire, a duplicate payment surfaces once a quarter, and the month-end estimate of unposted invoices remains an estimate.
The risk that grows quietly is dependency. The two people who know how the exceptions work are also the two people the company cannot afford to lose, and a process that lives in their heads cannot be audited, scaled or handed over.
A plausible organisation with realistic proportions. The figures are there to be recalculated on your data; they are not a client result.
A European industrial manufacturer with four plants, 2,500 employees, SAP S/4HANA and Microsoft 365 E3; accounts payable runs in a shared-services team of five in Poland.
2,500 supplier invoices a month; roughly 60% PDF by email, 30% scans, 10% supplier-portal downloads; about 40% relate to purchase orders, the rest are cost invoices that need an approval.
Attachments are saved from Outlook to a folder, typed into SAP MIRO by three clerks, and cost invoices are approved by email. An Excel tracker lists what is still open; it is updated on Fridays.
Around seven minutes of handling per invoice, plus unrecorded time on investigations and reminders; a recurring backlog of 200 to 400 invoices in the second half of the month.
Invoices are captured directly from the mailbox and the scanner folder, read by UiPath Document Understanding, validated against SAP master data and purchase orders, and posted by robots; cost invoices go to the owner as a Teams approval; only unreadable or disputed documents reach a person.
In the modelled case, manual handling drops from 100% of invoices to the exception share (15 to 20% in the first months, falling as rules are tuned), cycle time from days to the same day, and the team's working month is released for supplier reconciliation and closing. These are modelled potentials, not measured results.
Proposed solution
Nothing new needs buying: the end-to-end invoice flow we design and deliver runs on the UiPath Platform and Microsoft 365 that you already own. Documents are collected from the shared mailbox, the scanner folder on SharePoint and the supplier portal, then classified and read by UiPath Document Understanding, which ships with a pre-trained invoice model and improves on your own documents through validation feedback. Robots check every field against SAP: vendor, bank account, PO number, quantities, prices and tax codes. Clean invoices are posted immediately; anything outside the rules becomes a task for a person, with the reasons attached.
Exceptions are handled where people already work. A PO price difference becomes a validation task in UiPath Action Center; an invoice without a PO is sent to the cost centre owner as an approval in Microsoft Teams with the PDF and the coding proposal in the card. Every decision, timestamp and document version is written to the audit record on SharePoint, and Orchestrator keeps the queue, retries and logs. Dashboards in UiPath Insights show volumes, exception rates and throughput per day.
We deliberately keep the stack small: one document engine, one execution layer, one approval surface. Nothing in the flow depends on the ERP's user interface where an API exists, and the SAP posting is done through standard interfaces (BAPI) rather than by imitating a user.
UiPath Document Understanding pre-trained Invoices model and Validation Station; UiPath Orchestrator queues, triggers and audit; UiPath Integration Service connectors for Microsoft Outlook 365 and Microsoft OneDrive & SharePoint; UiPath Action Center actionable notifications in Microsoft Teams; Microsoft Teams Approvals app
The intake workflow (mailbox, scanner folder, portal), the business-rule layer (duplicates, tolerances, tax codes, legal entity, GL coding proposals), SAP posting and error handling, exception routing and reminders, the SharePoint audit record, reporting and the runbook for the AP team
SAP S/4HANA posting and PO/GR lookups through UiPath SAP activities (BAPI/OData); supplier-portal downloads where no API exists
How the automated process works
- AutomationA new email in the shared mailbox or a new file on the scanner library triggers the intake; attachments are split, deduplicated and queued in Orchestrator
- AutomationDocument Understanding classifies each document and extracts header and line data, including multi-page invoices and credit notes
- SystemRobots look up the vendor, PO, goods receipt and bank account in SAP and apply the tolerance and tax rules
- AutomationInvoices that match are posted in SAP and archived on SharePoint with the extraction confidence and the rule trail
- PersonLow-confidence fields go to Validation Station for a ten-second check; cost invoices go to the owner as a Teams approval with the PDF attached
- AutomationApproved or corrected invoices are posted; rejected ones return to the supplier with a standard message and a reason code
- AutomationInsights dashboards and a daily Teams summary show what was posted, what is waiting and why
Human-in-the-loop model
Automation handles
- Capture, classification and data extraction for every document, whatever the channel
- Matching against purchase orders, goods receipts, vendor master data and tolerance rules
- Posting, archiving, reminders and the daily status summary
- Standard replies to suppliers about receipt and status
People decide
- Approval of cost invoices without a purchase order, in Teams, within their delegated limits
- Price and quantity differences above tolerance, routed to the buyer with the evidence
- New vendors, changed bank accounts and anything the rules flag as unusual
- Rule changes: tolerances, coding tables and approval thresholds remain owned by finance
Before and after
Systems and integrations
The stack is deliberately short: one engine, one execution layer, one place where a person decides.
Inputs
- Outlook shared mailbox
- scanner folder on SharePoint
- supplier portal
- XML e‑invoices
Automation layer
- UiPath Orchestrator
- UiPath Robots
- UiPath Document Understanding
- UiPath Integration Service
- UiPath Action Center
Target systems
- SAP S/4HANA (MIRO/BAPI)
- SharePoint audit archive
- UiPath Insights
Human touchpoints: Microsoft Teams Approvals; Action Center tasks in Teams; daily status summary in a Teams channel
Technologies used
pre-trained invoice model reads header and line data from PDFs and scans; Validation Station for low-confidence fields
Aqueue every invoice, run the rules, post to SAP, retry, log and audit
Awatches the shared mailbox and the scanner library, archives documents and evidence
Avalidation and exception tasks completed without leaving Teams
Acost-invoice approvals by budget owners with the document attached
Avolume, exception and throughput dashboards for the AP manager
Avendor, PO and goods-receipt lookups; invoice posting
AIllustrative economic model
Numbers you can check against your own data.
Seven minutes of handling per invoice is a conservative average we see across matched and unmatched invoices, and like every number here it is illustrative rather than measured at a client; €25 is a fully loaded hourly cost for a shared-services role in Central Europe. We show capacity released, not headcount removed; how it is used is your decision.
Run the numbers on your data
An illustrative estimate from your own inputs. It models released capacity; it is not a promise of savings.
Business benefits
- Handling time per invoice falls from minutes to seconds for the matched majority; people work only on the exception share
- Invoices are posted the day they arrive, so the payables ledger, accruals and cash forecast reflect reality at month end
- Early-payment discounts become achievable because approval no longer depends on an email being noticed
- Duplicates, wrong tax codes and payments to unverified bank accounts are blocked at intake instead of being recovered later
- Supplier questions are answered from a status that exists, and the number of questions falls once invoices stop going missing
- Volume growth and seasonal peaks are absorbed by robots, not by recruitment or overtime
The management view
- One live view of the payables pipeline: what arrived, what is posted, what is waiting for whom and for how long
- Approval discipline is enforced by the flow, not by reminders; delegation limits are applied every time
- A complete audit trail per invoice: document, extraction, rules applied, decisions and timestamps
- The process becomes independent of individual employees and documented in the flow itself
Board-level KPIs
Security and governance
The automation holds exactly the rights it needs, and not one more.
- Robots use dedicated SAP accounts with posting rights only; no human credentials are shared and every action is logged in Orchestrator
- The shared mailbox is accessed through Microsoft Graph with application permissions scoped to that mailbox only
- Invoice images, extracted fields and approvals are written to your Microsoft 365 tenant, and the robots that read them run from the EU region of UiPath Automation Cloud
- Bank-account changes and new vendors are never posted automatically; they always require a person and a second control
- Approval thresholds and tolerance rules are versioned, and changes require sign-off from finance
Why now
Every month of waiting costs the modelled €7,300 of capacity, plus the discounts and error corrections that are never budgeted
Mandatory e‑invoicing in Poland (KSeF) changes the inbound channel; a flow built now can take structured e‑invoices and PDFs through the same rules
Pre-trained invoice models and connectors for Outlook, SharePoint and Teams have removed most of the custom development this used to require
Relevant executive roles
Payables become visible and predictable; the close no longer waits for a folder of unposted PDFs
The same team absorbs more entities and volume without recruitment, and exception handling becomes measurable
A standard, auditable integration with SAP instead of macros, email rules and personal scripts
Common questions and objections
Variety is what a document model is for. The pre-trained model handles common layouts on day one and learns your suppliers' formats from the validations your team makes anyway. Truly unreadable documents are routed to a person, not forced through.
The rules and the document model are independent of the ERP; only the posting step changes. Many clients automate before a migration precisely to clean their vendor data and exception categories first.
A Teams approval carries the document, the proposal and a due date, and it escalates by itself. The difference from email is that the invoice cannot disappear and the owner's queue is visible to their manager.
When this is not the right solution
- Volumes below a few hundred invoices a month, where a good mailbox routine and templates are cheaper than automation
- The purchase-order process is not used, so most invoices have nothing to match against; fixing procurement discipline comes first
- Vendor master data is unreliable, in which case we start with the vendor master change process instead
A question for the next management meeting
How many people-days a month does this company spend moving invoice data from documents into the ERP, and what would that time be worth in the close?
Implementation approach
A scope without ambiguity, before anything is signed.
We deliver
- A sample of your invoices, examined for channels, document quality, PO share, exception categories and volumes
- Configuration and training of the Document Understanding invoice model on your suppliers' documents
- The business-rule layer: duplicates, tolerances, tax codes, legal entities, GL coding proposals
- SAP posting, error handling and the exception flows in Action Center and Teams
- The SharePoint audit archive, Insights dashboards and the daily status summary
- Pilot with one legal entity or supplier group, then rollout with hypercare and a runbook for the AP team
We need from you
- Three months of invoice history with the corresponding SAP postings
- A process owner in accounts payable and a buyer for the tolerance rules
- Technical accounts for SAP test and production and for the shared mailbox
- The current approval matrix and delegation limits
Stages
Discovery
Sample analysis, channels, exception categories, volumes and rules with the process owners
Design
Target flow, tolerance and coding rules, approval thresholds, security model
Build
Document model, robots, SAP integration, Teams and Action Center touchpoints
Validation
Parallel run on real invoices, exception handling, acceptance by the AP team
Go-live
Controlled start per legal entity with supervision and hypercare
Optimisation
Monitoring, rule tuning, model feedback, extension to further entities
Departmental. Effort depends on the number of legal entities and document formats, the share of cost invoices without a PO, and the quality of vendor master data.
Three clerks, one shared mailbox, 2,500 invoices a month.
Send us one month of invoice statistics: volumes by channel, the PO share and your exception categories. We come back with an assessment of the automatable share and a model on your numbers.
Model one month of your invoicesThe neighbouring process usually has the same problem
Stop chasing price and quantity differences by email while supplier payments wait for weeks.
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