Accounts payable document automation

What it automates in accounts payable

docRefinery does the capture step of accounts payable: it turns supplier documents into checked, structured data. It reads a PDF, scan or photo of a supplier document and returns the fields your team would otherwise key in, with confidence scores and page citations. Approval, GL coding, matching and payment stay in your AP or ERP system.

What gets keyed from each supplier document

Invoices and purchase orders are in the 20-type catalogue, with field-by-field detail on the invoice and purchase order pages. Credit notes, remittances and statements are set up as a workflow or a custom type, trained at no charge.

Two hundred suppliers, two hundred templates

Accounts payable is the best case for docRefinery because your supplier list barely changes. A supplier's invoices come out of the same billing system on the same template every month, so a few hundred layouts can cover years of invoices. The first invoice from a supplier is learned once. Every invoice after it is remembered, not relearned. When a supplier redesigns its invoice, the new layout is re-trained without anything for your team to schedule (see vendor layout changes).

The advantage is only as large as the repetition. Two hundred suppliers billing monthly is two hundred layouts and thousands of remembered invoices. A long tail of one-off suppliers, each sending a single invoice a year, still gets extracted, but each one is new and gains nothing from memory.

Checks that catch invoice errors before posting

Workflow rules run on every document: line items add up to the subtotal, tax matches the printed rate, a PO reference is present. Each rule must pass its tests before it is saved. A failed rule flags the run for review instead of passing quietly. And when an invoice has no PO number, the field comes back null rather than a plausible guess.

Who signs off before an invoice posts

You set confidence thresholds per field, so total due and bank details can demand more than a line description. Anything under its threshold lands in a review queue beside the source page, with the value's location highlighted. Every correction is kept on the run. A correction can also become a suggested fix for that supplier's layout, replayed on that layout's past documents before anyone accepts it. docRefinery extracts the bank details that are printed. It does not check that an account belongs to the supplier, so a changed account still needs your payment controls.

What else an AP team gets

Layout memory and review are the headline, but most of the daily benefit comes from the parts around them.

• One format for five documents. Invoices, POs, credit notes, remittances and statements all return the same field and table shape, so matching code is written once.
• Field names your ERP already uses. A Return as alias on each field sets the output key, so supplier_ref or net_total lands in the right import column.
• Line items as rows, with quantity, unit price and tax kept together for the match.
• New document types at no charge. Custom types are trained, hosted and re-trained for free, and a workflow starts from one sample document, with versions, replay and compare before it goes live.
• A view of where time goes. Insights tracks vendors, flagged fields and auto-approval trends, so you can see which suppliers cost reviewer time.
• Control over who does what. Governed fields, owner, admin and member roles, and invites keep the field set consistent across the team.
• An integration you can audit. API keys have an expiry, can be revoked, and keep an activity log.
• Overseas suppliers. 70+ languages and scripts are supported.
• Your own infrastructure if finance requires it: private VPC or fully air-gapped on premises, on Enterprise.

From capture to the ledger

Plugging in is mostly a one-off mapping. Name your fields once with Return as, point your code at the API (extract a document), and every document arrives in the same format. Without a developer, use a dashboard export: in Excel each table gets its own sheet, so line items stay together for matching, and corrected values are always included. CSV gives one row per invoice. The Chrome extension, in early access and not in the Chrome Web Store yet, auto-fills a web form such as a supplier portal. There is no native ERP connector or webhook today; both, along with pulling invoices from a shared inbox, are in design on the roadmap.

What manual invoice processing costs

Ardent Partners' Accounts Payable Metrics that Matter in 2026, published through Medius (an AP automation vendor that sponsors it), puts the average cost of processing a single invoice at $9.90, against $2.67 for best-in-class teams. It reports an average invoice exception rate of 19.9%, against 11.8% for best-in-class. These are third-party industry benchmarks, not docRefinery's measured performance.

AP teams that should look elsewhere

• Most of your invoices already arrive as structured e-invoices (XML or EDI). That data needs no extraction.
• Your suppliers are mostly one-off, so layouts rarely repeat.
• You want one product to do approvals, matching and payment. docRefinery is the capture layer underneath those.
• You need invoices pulled from a shared inbox automatically today.