Illustrative case study
Accounts payable exceptions, handled by an agent with guardrails
A mid-sized operations team processes supplier invoices by hand. Most invoices match a purchase order and pass policy. The exceptions take most of the time. The approach below keeps routine cases moving while people keep control of the decisions that carry risk.
This is a hypothetical scenario based on common accounts payable challenges. It does not describe a client engagement, and it reports no results or figures.
The starting point
- Invoices arrive by email and as PDFs in several layouts, and staff re-key the fields into the ledger.
- Duplicate invoices are caught only when someone remembers an earlier one.
- Invoices without a purchase order wait in a shared inbox until an approver has time.
- Nobody can easily answer why a particular invoice was approved last quarter.
The approach
The agent is scoped to four tools: read an invoice, look up a purchase order, check the vendor master and search the ledger for duplicates. It cannot release payments. It can approve routine invoices that pass every check, route exceptions to a named approver with a summary, or hold an invoice that may be a duplicate.
- Extraction: fields are read from the document and shown beside the source image so a reviewer can check them.
- Checks: purchase order match, vendor status, duplicate search and policy thresholds run in a fixed order, and each result is logged.
- Decisions: the policy is deterministic and written down. The model helps with extraction and with summaries, not with the approval rule itself.
- Escalation: any missing field, conflicting data or failed check sends the invoice to a person with the reasons listed.
Guardrails
- Least privilege: the agent holds read access to purchase orders and the vendor list, and write access only to its own review queue.
- Approval gate: every payment release stays with the accounts payable team.
- Audit trail: inputs, tool calls, check results and the final routing are stored for each invoice.
- Stop conditions: the agent halts and escalates when extraction confidence is low or when two sources disagree.
Measures to track against a baseline
- Average time from invoice receipt to routing decision, compared with today.
- Share of invoices resolved without manual re-keying.
- Duplicates caught before payment, reviewed by the team each month.
- Escalation rate and the reasons for escalation, used to refine the rules.
- Cost per invoice processed, including model and infrastructure costs.
How a pilot would be run
A pilot starts with one vendor group and one invoice type. The baseline is measured first. The evaluation set includes normal invoices, duplicates, missing purchase orders and malformed documents. The rollout widens only after the stop conditions and the escalation paths have been tested with the accounts payable team.
Discuss a process like this one.
Tell us about the workflow, the volumes and the controls your organization needs. We will explain how we would scope a bounded pilot.