Sanaf, the AI employee

AI accounts payable

Supplier bills arrive as attachments, get entered by hand, wait for an approver who is travelling, and are paid late or twice. This job captures them, matches them against what was ordered, chases the approver and prepares the payment run. It never pays anything.

What it does

Concretely

  • Captures supplier invoices from email and attachments.
  • Enters bills into your accounting software.
  • Matches bills to purchase orders and deliveries, and shows any difference.
  • Routes bills for approval and chases the approver who has not looked.
  • Prepares the weekly payment run as a list for a person to release.

It never pays and never approves

Every payment run is a list for a person to release. A bill that does not match its order goes to a person with the difference shown. A new supplier or a changed bank detail is flagged before anything moves. Accounts payable is the process most worth automating and the one where automation must stop hardest, because the failure mode is money leaving the business.

Changed bank details are the attack

The common invoice fraud is not a fake company, it is a real supplier’s invoice with different bank details, sent from an address that looks close enough. Flagging a changed bank detail before anything moves is the single control that catches it, and it only works if it happens every time rather than when somebody is paying attention.

Matching is where the overcharge is found

A bill agreeing with the purchase order and the delivery is the check that catches a wrong quantity, a price that drifted from the quote or a delivery that never arrived. It is tedious, it is why the role exists, and it is the first thing dropped when the person doing it is busy, which is precisely when the errors get through.

Chasing the approver

Late payment is usually not a cash decision, it is a bill sitting in an approval queue belonging to someone in meetings. Suppliers are annoyed by the delay and nobody in the business chose it. Chasing the approver is unglamorous, slightly awkward, and reliably worth more than it costs.

Questions

Frequently asked

Can it release a payment run?
No, never. It prepares the run as a list and a person releases it. That is a hard rule in the job description rather than a permission you could grant by accident, because releasing payment is irreversible in a way almost nothing else here is.
What happens when a bill does not match the purchase order?
It stops and goes to a person with the difference shown side by side. It does not choose which figure is right, because the answer usually lives in a conversation with the supplier rather than in either document.
How does it handle a supplier asking when they will be paid?
Answering that is part of the job, from the actual state of the bill: received, matched, waiting on approval, or scheduled in the next run. Most supplier chasing exists because nobody had time to look it up.