Who approves payment?

A person. Payment authority stays gated by default and opens only on your decision, with the threshold set by you and visible inside the workflow rather than promised in a policy document.

What if it codes something wrong?

The coding rule is inspectable, so the correction is made once in the rule rather than repeatedly on invoices, and the trail shows what changed and who changed it.

Invoice intake and exception triage

Handling only the clean invoices moves the pile rather than clearing it

Today

Coding from memory, matching by hand

Invoices arrive in a shared inbox, in a handful of formats, and from portals that each want their own login.
Coding gets done from memory of how the last one like it was coded.
Matching against purchase orders and receiving records happens by hand, or quietly stops happening.
Approvers get chased, and the pile nobody posted turns up at period end, when it is somebody else's problem too.

With agents

The invoice that does not match gets a decision

Exceptions surface with the reason attached.
The clean path stops consuming attention.
The record is filed as the work happens.

How an agent runs it

The clean invoice was never the difficulty. The workflow is built around what happens to the one that does not match, and who decides.

01

Intake with origin recorded

Monitors the intake channels you authorize and captures each document with its origin recorded.

02

Extraction and normalization

Extracts the fields and normalizes supplier and line detail against your own records.

03

Matching, with the failed field named

Matches the invoice to its purchase order and receiving record where one exists, and names the field that failed when it does not.

04

Coding from written rules

Codes to the account and cost center using rules that are written down rather than remembered.

05

Human gate

Routes every exception, and anything above your approval threshold, to a named approver with the mismatch shown rather than summarized.

06

Filed as the work happens

Files the document and its trail against the supplier record as the work happens.

07

Queue status by person

Reports the state of the queue, including which items are waiting on a person and which person they are waiting on.

Results

What changes when exceptions arrive with their reason

Exceptions arrive with the reason

The agent shows the field that failed to match instead of handing somebody an unexplained problem they have to rediscover.

The clean path stops costing attention

It runs against written rules, so a person is asked only where the rules stop.

The record is filed as it happens

Filing is a step inside the workflow rather than a task that waits behind it.

Where this fits

Workflow / Automate a Workflow

Tier 1, one process end to end, through the Automate a Workflow door. Payables suit a first engagement because the rules are already written somewhere and the exceptions are already known by name. From there the same pattern extends toward an accounts payable role and then a wider finance back office, framed as an expansion path rather than a promised outcome.

Automate a Workflow covers the tier; How It Works covers the gates and approval surfaces behind it.

Tier 1 / Prove

How It Works

Questions, answered

Intake normalization is part of the workflow rather than a precondition for it. The formats that resist normalization get flagged for a person instead of guessed at, and that flag is how you learn which supplier to fix first.