What is three-way invoice match
Three-way match is the AP control everybody signs off on and roughly half of mid-market AP teams skip in practice. The skip is rational on a per-invoice basis (the chase costs more than the average exception saves) and irrational at the portfolio level (the overbilling and fraud add up). The agent makes the math work by running the chase for free.
The three documents
Purchase order: the formal commitment to buy. Receipt: the proof goods or services arrived. Invoice: the vendor's bill. The match compares quantity, price, and line item across all three. Match clean, post the bill. Match dirty, escalate.
Why the control gets skipped
Receipts are missing. The receipt is on a phone in a warehouse somewhere. The receipt is a paper sheet a foreman signed. The invoice arrived two weeks before the receipt was uploaded. AP cannot match what they cannot find, and the policy of escalating every missing receipt would stall the whole queue.
What the agent does instead
Reads the invoice from the AP intake. Pulls the PO from the ERP. Pulls the receipt from the warehouse system or the requester's phone. Compares. If clean, posts the draft. If dirty, runs the follow-up itself: emails the requester for the missing receipt, calls the vendor for the quantity discrepancy, drafts the credit memo for the price variance. The AP clerk reviews drafts rather than chasing exceptions.
Frequently asked
What ERPs is this wired to?
NetSuite, Sage Intacct, QuickBooks Online, Xero, SAP S/4HANA, SAP Business One, Oracle ERP Cloud, Microsoft Dynamics 365 on the standard authorization model.
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