Accounts payable automation: the whole process, step by step

Accounts payable automation is often sold as one product. In practice it is eight steps, each of which can be automated more or less, and each of which carries a control your auditors care about. Teams that get the most from it treat it as a chain: they automate the steps that are pure handling, keep people where judgment is needed, and make sure every step leaves a record.

This guide walks the chain end to end. The capture step itself has two companion guides of its own.

What AP automation covers

The goal is not "no people in AP". It is that people spend their time on decisions (is this charge right, should we pay it) instead of on handling (opening, typing, filing, forwarding, chasing). The diagram shows the usual split.

The process, step by step

1. Intake

Invoices arrive by mail, by email and as files from vendor systems. The first win is one front door per channel: one AP mailbox instead of invoices sent to whoever the vendor knows, one scanning point for paper.

Automate

Reading the AP mailbox and capturing attachments; scanning paper in batches; picking up files dropped by other systems.

Still a person

Opening mail and feeding the scanner; deciding what to do with documents that are not invoices.

Ademero

Content Central reads mailboxes (Microsoft 365, Gmail or IMAP) and watched folders. CapturePoint 6 scans paper stacks and imports PDF and image files. Paige takes in invoices that arrive as files.

2. Capture

The invoice is split from the stack, read, and turned into data: vendor, invoice number, dates, totals and, if you need them, line items. This is where most typing disappears.

Automate

Splitting, recognizing the document type, reading fields and line items, checking the line math, checking the vendor against your list.

Still a person

Reviewing what the software flags: missing values, low confidence, totals that do not add up.

Ademero

CapturePoint 6 on a Windows PC, reading locally, with a review screen that says why each item waits. Paige in the cloud.

How to judge accuracy and review is covered in the invoice OCR guide.

3. Coding

Each invoice, or each line, is assigned to a general ledger account, and often to a department, job or cost center. Coding is where AP knowledge lives, and where mistakes become misstated reports.

Automate

Filling vendor details and payment terms from your systems; offering only valid GL accounts and vendors in drop-down lists; carrying a vendor’s usual coding forward.

Still a person

Splitting an invoice across accounts; coding a new vendor; anything unusual.

Ademero

Content Central can fill its vendor and GL account lists from the accounting system, and look up vendor details from your ERP database when an invoice arrives.

4. Matching and checks

Before an invoice is approved, someone checks that it is real, not a duplicate, and for goods or services you actually ordered and received. Where purchase orders exist, that is the classic two-way match (invoice against PO) or three-way match (invoice, PO and receiving document).

Automate

Duplicate checks on vendor and invoice number; bringing the PO and receiving documents to the approver; checking that line items add up.

Still a person

Resolving mismatches: short shipments, price changes, partial deliveries. Where automatic matching exists, it is typically in the ERP or a dedicated AP platform.

Ademero

Content Central warns about duplicate values while documents are indexed. A packet keyed on the PO number keeps the invoice, the PO and the receiving documents together, so the approver sees all of them in one place.

5. Approval

Approval is a decision, so it stays with people. What software removes is the routing, the waiting and the chasing.

Automate

Starting the right approval by amount, vendor or department; reminders and escalation; substitutes during absences; recording every decision.

Still a person

The decision itself, with a note when it is rejected.

Ademero

Content Central approval processes: chains of people or groups, voting rules, deadlines and escalation, approve and reject links in the email, an optional PIN, and an approver’s signature stamped on approval.

6. Export to accounting

Approved invoice data becomes a bill in the accounting system, without retyping. This is where a capture tool alone stops and a connected system pays for itself.

Automate

Creating the bill with header and line detail; skipping duplicates; recording whether each export succeeded.

Still a person

Fixing the occasional rejected export (a closed period, an inactive vendor).

Ademero

Content Central exports approved invoices to QuickBooks Online, QuickBooks Desktop, Sage 50, Sage X3, Workday and Epicor, with duplicate detection, an export status field and an export history. CapturePoint 6 writes a data file with every captured value; Paige delivers data by SFTP or webhook.

7. Payment hand-off

The payment run belongs in the accounting system or the bank, where payment permissions and bank controls already live. Automation here is about closing the loop: once an invoice is paid, it should leave every queue and be filed as paid.

Automate

Marking the invoice paid, clearing it from queues and moving it to the paid folder.

Still a person

Selecting and releasing payments; verifying any change to a vendor’s bank details by calling a known contact.

Ademero

A Content Central rule fires when the status field changes to Paid, clears the invoice from work queues and files it.

8. Retention

Invoices must be findable for audits and tax questions, then destroyed on schedule. A good AP system makes the auditor's request ("show me every invoice from this vendor last year, with its approvals") a search, not a project.

Automate

Naming and filing each invoice by vendor and number; retention by document type; destruction on schedule.

Still a person

Setting the retention policy with your accountant; placing records on hold when litigation or an audit requires it.

Ademero

Content Central retention schedules per document type, legal holds (keep a document indefinitely, overriding its schedule), full-text search. CapturePoint 6 files searchable PDFs, optionally PDF/A, in named folders.

Click to enlarge

Controls to keep (or gain) when you automate

Automation should make controls stronger, because every step is enforced and recorded. Check these three before you go live.

Duplicate invoices

Duplicates arrive as a resent email, a paper copy of an emailed invoice, or a statement mistaken for an invoice. Check in two places: at capture or indexing (vendor plus invoice number), and at export to accounting. Watch for near-duplicates, such as an invoice number with and without a leading zero, and keep statements out of the invoice document type.

Separation of duties

The person who enters an invoice should not be the person who approves it, and neither should be able to release payment alone. In practice:

• Capture and coding staff can edit invoice data, but cannot approve.
• Approvers decide, and their decision is recorded; during approval, only the current approver should be able to change fields.
• Payments are released in the accounting system or bank, under its own permissions.

In Content Central, document-type permissions control who can add, edit and delete invoices, approval settings can let only the active member edit, and field permissions can change from stage to stage.

Audit trail

For any invoice you should be able to show who captured it, what was changed, who approved it and when, and when it was exported. Content Central's event log records logins, views, changes, approvals (including PIN approvals) and emails, and every document keeps its own version history.

Roll it out in stages

Changing every AP step at once is how projects stall. Each stage below delivers value on its own, so you can pause after any of them.

1. 01

   Stage 1: capture and filing

   Scan and read invoices, review the flagged ones, and file every invoice as a named, searchable PDF with a data file. No change for approvers yet. The typing disappears first.
2. 02

   Stage 2: one front door

   Move vendors to a single AP mailbox and capture it automatically. Paper keeps going through the scanning station.
3. 03

   Stage 3: approvals

   Route invoices for approval by amount or department, with deadlines and escalation. Start with one department and a simple rule; add thresholds once it runs smoothly.
4. 04

   Stage 4: export to accounting

   Send approved invoices to your accounting system as bills. Run in parallel with manual entry for a period and compare.
5. 05

   Stage 5: close the loop

   Mark paid invoices, clear queues, apply retention schedules, and set up the reports your auditors ask for.

Before each stage, write down how you will know it worked. Useful measures, all of which you can count yourself:

• Invoices typed by hand per week

  Should fall sharply after stage 1.

• Days from receipt to approval

  The number stage 3 should move.

• Invoices waiting on someone, and on whom

  Visible in the approval queue once stage 3 is live.

• Duplicates caught before payment

  Each one is money that did not leave.

• Time to answer an auditor’s request

  From days of pulling files to a search.

Which Ademero piece does what

Payments, and automatic PO matching where you need it, stay in your accounting system or a dedicated AP platform; Ademero feeds them clean data and keeps the documents. For approvals and exports, a Content Central demo shows the rules running on invoices like yours.

Questions