AP Invoice Intake & Approval Agent

Background

Accounts payable often runs on a shared drive long after the rest of the business has moved on. Invoices arrive by email, get saved into whoever’s folder, and the only reliable way to find one later is to ask the person who filed it.

Approval was manual in the literal sense: open the PDF, draw a stamp on it in a licensed desktop tool, save, and move the file by hand.

Challenges

Invoices lived in personal folders, so retrieval depended on knowing who saved them.
Approving one meant stamping a PDF in a separate application and moving the file manually.
That stamping tool cost $3,000 a year and did nothing but draw a mark.
No invoice data was captured, so nobody could report on volume, ageing, or spend by job.

Results

250 invoices approved in a single day at peak

Approval reduced to one click

$3,000 a year stamping license retired

Solution

Axcend built Luca, an agent that handles the invoice at the point it arrives.

Reads the invoice image and extracts vendor, invoice number, amount, job, and PO into a structured record.
Applies the approval stamp automatically, which is what made the separate desktop license unnecessary.
Files it against the job, so retrieval no longer depends on who processed it.

Approvals became a queue rather than a filing exercise, and AP data became something finance can actually query.

ENLARGEA completed invoice record with the stamp applied. Click to enlarge.