Vendor Bill Approval
AP is high-volume, low-margin-for-error work. A duplicated bill, a missed early-pay discount, or an approval that skipped the matrix shows up in the close, or worse, in the auditor's sample. This playbook ingests bills from email and vendor portals, runs three-way match against the open PO and goods received note, routes through the approval matrix, and posts to the GL.
The problem
AP cycles tend to live in three places at once. The shared inbox, a routing spreadsheet, and the GL. Bills sit waiting for an approver who's on PTO. Duplicate invoice numbers from the same vendor slip through because no one cross-checked. Accruals at month-end depend on whatever the AP clerk can reconstruct from memory. Approval thresholds documented in policy and approval thresholds enforced in practice are rarely the same thing.
How DataChi runs it
DataCHI captures bills from the AP inbox and vendor portals, extracts header and line detail with OCR, and matches against the open PO and GRN within tolerance. Exceptions route to the buyer or receiver named on the PO. Approval routing follows the documented matrix by amount, GL account, and cost centre, with duplicate-invoice checks against vendor and invoice number. Approved bills post to NetSuite, QuickBooks, or Xero with the full approval chain attached.
What's included
- Bill capture from AP inbox, vendor portals, and EDI feeds
- Line-level OCR extraction with vendor master validation
- Three-way match against open PO and goods received note within tolerance
- Duplicate detection by vendor, invoice number, amount, and date
- Approval routing by amount, GL account, and cost-centre matrix
- Posting to the GL with the approval chain attached per bill
Who it's for
AP managers, controllers, and finance ops leads at mid-market companies running PO-based procurement where the approval matrix needs to hold up under audit.
Outcomes
- Bills cleared inside the approval SLA the business expects
- Duplicates caught pre-payment, not in next month's recon
Ready to run Vendor Bill Approval with DataChi?
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