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PO and invoice matching, exceptions only

An Aivell reads each supplier invoice, finds the matching purchase order in your database and compares them line by line. Clean matches are approved for payment automatically; price drift, quantity gaps and missing orders pause for a human decision. Both documents are processed onboard — behind your firewall, not in a cloud.

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starts when: A supplier invoice arrives in the accounts payable mailbox

The problem

Somewhere in accounts payable, a person sits with an invoice on one screen and a purchase order on the other, comparing digits. Most pairs match — which is exactly why the job corrodes attention. The whole point of the exercise is the one line in forty where the supplier billed 12 units against an order for 10, or the unit price grew 4% since the quote. Tired eyes wave those through, and waved-through is paid.

Big ERP suites automate matching — at ERP prices, after ERP projects. The lighter cloud tools want your invoices and your purchase orders uploaded together, which hands an outside service a complete map of what you buy and what you pay. So in most small and mid-sized firms, the digits still get compared by hand — even though teams that automate document-heavy payables work report time savings of 70–90%.

How your Aivell does it

  1. The invoice is read on arrival. PDF or scan, it is read onboard the box the moment it hits the AP mailbox — reference numbers, lines, totals.
  2. The order is fetched, read-only. The Aivell looks up the purchase order in your database through a guardrail that permits looking and nothing else.
  3. Lines are compared, with your tolerances. Quantities, unit prices, totals — a euro of rounding is forgiven, small drift is accepted but logged, and the thresholds are sentences you can edit.
  4. Clean matches move on by themselves. Marked approved for payment, logged, done. This is the majority of invoices, and no human ever needed to see them.
  5. Mismatches stop and wait. The chore pauses; the pair goes to your AP lead with the exact discrepancy spelled out. A tap on the phone approves or rejects, and only then does the supplier get an answer.

What lands on a human desk is no longer a stack — it is the short list of invoices that actually deserve judgment, each one arriving with its evidence attached.

The chore, as you'd write it.

No flowcharts, no code — a chore is just a message to your Aivell, in your own words. It shapes it into a solid, guarded procedure and follows it to the letter. This one:

Giulia Aivell · match invoices to orders ● active

pick up each supplier invoice from the ap mailbox

read it and find the po number — or work it out from supplier and amount

pull the purchase order from the database

compare line by line — quantities, unit prices, totals

everything within €1? mark it approved for payment

price drift up to 2% on a line — accept, but note it on the exception sheet

bigger gaps, missing po, wrong quantities — pause and hand it to Ines

answer the supplier only after Ines has decided

keep a weekly tally of matched versus escalated

You
Got it — I'll start right away, and check with you whenever something needs a human.
Giulia Aivell

The tools it uses.

Connected with single-click passkeys — no copied tokens, no OAuth hell.

Email receives invoices, answers suppliers on-thread
Documents & Vision reads each invoice on the box
Database looks up the matching purchase order
Spreadsheets tracks matches and exceptions

Sensible guardrails.

Every tool can be limited to exactly what this chore needs. For this one, you might set:

Database Purchase orders are read-only — the Aivell can look them up, never change them.
Email May reply to the invoicing supplier on the invoice's own thread; writing to any new address needs approval first.
Spreadsheets Adds rows to the match log and exception sheet; nothing already logged can be altered.

Questions, answered.

Which differences does the match catch? +

The classics — quantities billed above quantities ordered, unit prices that crept since the quote, totals that disagree with their own lines, and invoices referencing no order at all. Tolerances are yours to set in the chore, down to the euro or the percent.

What happens when something doesn't match? +

The chore pauses. The invoice, the order and a short note on exactly where they diverge go to the person you named, and you approve or reject from your phone. The Aivell resumes with your decision — it never argues a discrepancy away on its own.

Do our invoices and purchase orders get processed on external servers? +

Neither one does. The invoice is read by the box, the order is looked up in your own database over your own network, and the comparison happens onboard. Your purchasing terms and supplier prices stay commercial secrets.

The invoice has no PO number on it. Dead end? +

Not immediately. It tries to identify the order from the supplier, amounts and dates; a confident single match proceeds, anything less lands with a human — flagged as missing-reference so you can retrain the supplier, too.

Related.

What is an Aivell?

An Aivell is an on-premise AI colleague: a small box that plugs into your network, runs its own AI onboard and takes the repetitive work off your desk. Prompts, documents, data — nothing ever leaves your office. Unplug the internet: it keeps working.

You describe each task as a chore, in plain language. Your Aivell turns it into a solid, guarded procedure and runs it in the background — with guardrails on every tool, a complete audit trail, and approvals in your hand when you want them. One-time setup, fixed monthly fee. No tokens, no overages.

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onboard inference · air-gapped · fixed monthly fee