Accounts Payable Automation · Free calculator, no sign-up
Your finance team shouldn’t be a typing pool for invoices
AI agents capture, code, match, and route every invoice - and chase the missing paperwork themselves. See what manual processing costs you before deciding anything.
Your numbers
Your invoice workload
Capture, coding, matching, approval chasing, filing
Salary + overheads for the people doing this work
What manual processing costs you
Conservative estimate, based on your numbers
Annual savings with AI processing
£11,088
60 hours of manual work per month today
Current annual processing cost
£15,840
Hours returned to your team / year
504
Adjust the sliders to see your numbers.
Assumptions (conservative)
- AI document processing removes ~70% of manual handling time - industry studies report 60-80%; we use the middle.
- Exception invoices still get human review; that remaining time is included in the 30% you keep.
- Software and inference running costs are excluded here and typically run £200-£800/month at this volume.
What the AI actually does with each invoice
Captures & extracts
Invoices arrive by email, portal, or scan - the agent reads any layout, no templates to maintain.
Codes & matches
Applies your ledger coding rules, matches to purchase orders, and flags price or quantity mismatches.
Chases & routes
Missing PO? Wrong entity? The agent emails the supplier or requester itself, then routes approvals.
Posts & audits
Clean transactions land in Xero, QuickBooks, or Sage with attachments - every action logged.
This is a flagship use case for agentic AI - built on our workflow automation service. Accountancy practice? See AI for accountants.
The AI stack we build on
AP automation - common questions
What is accounts payable automation?
Accounts payable (AP) automation uses software - increasingly AI agents - to handle the invoice lifecycle without manual keying: capturing invoices from email or portals, extracting and validating the data, coding to the right ledger accounts, matching against purchase orders, routing approvals, and syncing everything to your accounting system. Humans handle exceptions and authorisations; the AI handles the repetition.
How is AI-based AP automation different from OCR tools?
Traditional OCR reads characters but breaks on new layouts and leaves the judgement - coding, matching, chasing - to people. An AI agent understands the document: it copes with unseen invoice formats, applies your coding rules, spots duplicates and price mismatches, chases missing POs by email, and escalates only genuine exceptions. It's the difference between digitising the paperwork and actually doing the work.
Does it work with Xero, QuickBooks, or Sage?
Yes - we connect agents to Xero, QuickBooks, Sage, and most UK accounting platforms through their APIs, using governed integrations with least-privilege access and full audit logs. The agent posts transactions and attachments into your existing system; your accountant sees cleaner books, not a new tool to learn.
How much does AP automation save?
Industry studies consistently put the cost reduction at 60-80% per invoice, driven by removed keying time, fewer errors, and less approval-chasing. For a business processing 400 invoices a month at 9 minutes each, that's roughly 500+ hours a year returned to the finance team - use the calculator above for your own numbers.
See it process your actual invoices
Book a free 30-minute demo - bring a batch of real invoices and watch the agent capture, code, and match them live.