Automate PO Matching at the Line Level

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3 way matching for accounts payable is the obvious ‘best practice’ move for any company. After all, PO purchasing means that all expenses and purchases are approved BEFORE they are made rather than after. And 3 way matching means you always receive exactly what you paid for.

At the same time, manual 2 or 3 way matching for accounts payable can be tedious and time consuming. Invoices that are ‘line item heavy’, meaning that your procurement team must match ten pages of items, line after line, can bring down team morale.

3 way matching and 2 way match are part of the purchase order (PO) invoice process. They exist to prevent fraudulent invoices from slipping through the cracks and make sure that each supplier invoice has been recorded and paid correctly.

2 way matching is when you match the PO to the PO invoice.

The 3 way matching process is when you match the PO to the PO invoice and the packing slip or order receipt.

With so many details to review, 3-way matching can be a tedious process if done manually.

Typically with a manual match (whether done with paper or pdfs), a member of the accounts payable team gathers all the relevant documents in a transaction in order to satisfy the matching procedures. He or she looks at each line of each document one by one to make sure they all match.

Unfortunately, PO and invoice lines rarely align, so it’s a massive game of hunting and searching. Worse, the item name and/or description of the item on the PO and the invoice don’t always exactly align, adding an element of educated guesses to the matching process.

Now imagine a transaction with a 10 page line item PO. Someone has to match it to a 10 page PO invoice. AND match it to a 10 page packing slip. That’s a LOT of lines to match. And that’s for ONE invoice!

Manual invoice matching is even more difficult when a PO remains open for months or even years.

And, worse, people can lose paper documents, pay duplicate invoices and misread figures. Any manual system is subject to both human error as well as fraud.

Plus, managing stacks of paperwork or pdfs and invoices is a repetitive and soul-sucking task that is incredibly inefficient and destroys employee morale.

Manually matching purchase orders is a nightmare!

Automating Invoice/PO Matching
So, many companies are turning to AP automation solutions that include automated 3 way and 2 way PO matching. And A/P One Enterprise for enterprise-sized companies, as well as A/P One AP automation for small and medium sized companies provides automated PO matching at the line level.

A/P One automatically compares this data to the other critical documents, such as the PO and receipt or packing slip. Intelligent optical character recognition (OCR) technology extracts the data from scanned documents and PDFs. Any discrepancies would then be highlighted and flagged for your AP clerk to investigate. This process works great for invoices with part numbers or SKUs.

But A/P One also provides another way to achieve automated 3-way matching. SmartMatch is an upgrade to the standard OCR technology, and uses algorithms and AI to match invoices down to the line even when there is no SKU or part numbers to match.

For retailers, manufacturers, agricultural companies, and other companies working in ‘line item heavy’ industries that include a lot of services, this technology has become vital.

SmartMatch works by assessing each of the products or services received (line by line), and then evaluating this against the total. If the AI finds a match then that line is approved. If not, the line is highlighted for human intervention.

So, even if two items have the same price, the system let’s you clarify which was delivered, and which wasn’t. Genius!

Combining these technologies has allowed A/P One customers to achieve 93% touchless PO purchasing. And the system makes it simple for AP clerks to address the 7% of mismatches.

A/P One takes the most tedious, error prone AP task and makes it simple.

It truly supercharges your AP team!