Stop Paying People to Hunt for Delivery Receipts
A supplier sends an invoice. The warehouse received part of the order. The delivery receipt lives in somebody’s inbox. Finance starts a treasure hunt. Apparently, this is what an integrated business looks like.
For a small or medium sized distributor, this is a useful place to deploy an AI engineer. Sit with receiving, purchasing, and accounts payable. Find out why the same documents get chased every week. Then connect the evidence.
Match the Facts First
The workflow compares three things: what you ordered, what arrived, and what the supplier billed. AI can extract details from a messy document and suggest the relevant order. Ordinary code checks quantities, prices, and approved tolerances. A person resolves disputed deliveries.
Consider a hypothetical order for 100 cartons. Only 80 arrive, but the invoice charges for 100. The agent should assemble the discrepancy and supporting records for review. It should never invent the missing delivery.
Use the ERP’s existing capabilities. Microsoft documents separate quantities for partial receipts and invoices in Business Central. Custom AI should help staff prepare and investigate the records, not quietly rewrite the rules.
Build Something You Can Reuse
The reusable agentic asset is the whole work procedure: an approved inbox connector, document extractor, matching rules, exception queue, and test cases. Give every document a stable identifier. Track what has already been processed so a forwarded email cannot create another bill.
Keep payment approval separate from document preparation. Preserve the original files and every correction. If the system fails halfway through, staff should see exactly where it stopped. “The AI got confused” is a lousy operating procedure.
Count the Work That Disappears
Illustrative calculation: 300 invoices at eight minutes each require 40 hours. At three minutes each, they require 15. That is 25 hours of recovered capacity, not automatically 25 hours of payroll savings.
Include setup, review, corrections, and software costs. Track incorrect matches and unresolved exceptions alongside speed. Start with one supplier and expand when the evidence supports it.
Your finance team should investigate discrepancies. Hunting for the damn attachment should not be a department.