For Payback Group, the aim was to industrialise invoicing audits that until then had been done occasionally and by hand, which meant on samples, which meant partially.
Map what was negotiated
The first step is knowing what the contract says. A retrieval-augmented system reads thousands of supplier contracts held as PDFs and extracts the price clauses, the year-end rebates and the payment terms.
The result is a living index of every contractual commitment, searchable in plain language by the purchasing teams. On its own that is already a considerable change for people who until then had to reopen a binder to answer a simple question.
Catch the discrepancies as they come
The system then checks incoming invoices against the contract database. Each invoice is read line by line and compared: does the price charged match the price negotiated, have the contractual rebates been applied, is this a duplicate.
An immediate effect on cash
The benefit works both ways. Incorrect payments are stopped before the money leaves the business, and credit notes are raised retrospectively on past errors. This is an application of artificial intelligence whose return on investment is almost immediate, which makes it easy to defend to a finance director.