Accounts payable automation does more than reduce manual invoice processing. It provides management with better visibility into spending, purchasing activity, and vendor pricing. By automating approvals and highlighting exceptions, businesses can reduce costs, improve internal controls, and make better purchasing decisions.

Accounts payable automation can be implemented as a standalone feature or as part of consulting services, like with our Interim CFO engagements, to improve visibility into spending and strengthen financial controls. Across many implementations, particularly in high-volume, lower-cost-of-goods industries, we frequently find businesses that are not taking full advantage of automation.

Exception reports often identify vendor price increases that have not yet been reflected in company pricing or ERP systems, resulting in lower profit margins and missed pricing adjustments. These insights help management respond more quickly, improve pricing accuracy, and protect profitability.

Benefits include:

• Reduce manual data entry
• Prevent duplicate payments
• Improve cash flow visibility
• Identify vendor price increases
• Strengthen financial controls
• Reduce month-end close time

Developed by experienced CPAs, our accounts payable automation software was built to eliminate manual invoice processing, catch invoice exceptions, and strengthen financial controls.

From purchase order imports to complex three-way matching, our platform gives accounting teams the exact tools they need to automate spend management, protect profit margins, and gain total visibility into purchasing activity.

System features include:

• Automatically import purchase orders from your system
• Process vendor invoices from PDF, Excel, OCR, EDI, and more
• Match invoice line items to purchase orders
• Custom workflows for vendor credits
• Exception reporting and batch approvals
• Payment scheduling and batch payment processing
• Automatic GL coding and expense categorization
• Vendor spend analysis and reporting
• Export payment information

Purchase orders are the foundation of accounts payable automation because they provide the baseline for invoice matching. The more complete and accurate your purchase order data is, the more automated your accounts payable process becomes.

SurveyKing offers several ways to keep purchase orders synchronized. For simple implementations, purchase orders can be imported from Excel. For businesses looking for full automation, we integrate directly with your accounting system using APIs. As purchase orders are created or updated, the changes are automatically synchronized with SurveyKing.

Every business handles purchasing differently, so we customize the integration to fit your existing workflow. Purchase orders can be matched at the line-item level, purchase order total level, or a combination of both while tracking received quantities and partial deliveries. Reporting provides an audit history of purchase orders, matched invoices, outstanding orders, and items yet to be received.

Features include:

• Excel purchase order imports
• API integrations with accounting systems
• Delivered quantity tracking
• Open purchase order reporting
• Purchase order and invoice matching history

Vendor invoices (sometimes sent as vendor statements with multiple invoice items) come in many different formats, making them one of the biggest challenges in accounts payable automation. SurveyKing supports PDF, Excel, EDI, API, and other electronic formats, allowing businesses to automate invoice processing regardless of how vendors submit invoices.

For PDF invoices, we include machine learning algorithms that are custom-tailored for your vendors.

After reviewing sample invoices, we extract invoice numbers, dates, totals, line items, and other required fields. Validation checks compare document totals against extracted line items, helping identify formatting changes or extraction issues before invoices enter the approval process.

Excel, EDI, and API integrations are also fully supported. Column mappings, field names, and import rules can be customized to match your accounting system and business processes, making it easy to integrate with both standard and custom vendor formats.

SurveyKing also detects duplicate invoice line items during the import process. Duplicate checks can be performed using item ID number, invoice amount, or other custom rules. Potential duplicates are automatically flagged before import, helping prevent duplicate payments. The upload screen displays the number of duplicate invoices found, and a dedicated reporting screen allows accounting teams to review and resolve them.

Features include:

• PDF invoice processing
• Excel invoice imports
• EDI invoice integration
• API invoice integration
• Automatic validation of invoice totals
• Vendor-specific import rules
• Invoice exception reporting
• Outstanding invoice reporting
• Vendor spend reporting

Matching logic determines whether an invoice matches an existing purchase order and if the invoice can be approved for payment automatically or routed to an exception queue for review. SurveyKing supports two-way matching, three-way matching, and fully customized approval rules based on your purchasing process.

Matching rules can be configured at the purchase order, line-item, or vendor level. Exception tolerances, quantity variances, partial deliveries, and other business rules can all be customized to determine when invoices are automatically approved and when manual review is required.

Vendor credits and credit memos can also be processed automatically. If a valid purchase order exists, credits can be matched and applied automatically, or custom workflows can be created to fit your accounting procedures.

Features include:

• Two-way invoice matching (purchase order and invoice)
• Three-way matching (purchase order, invoice, and receipt)
• Line-item matching
• Purchase order total matching
• Vendor-specific matching rules
• Pricing tolerance rules
• Quantity tolerance rules
• Partial delivery support
• Automatic credit and credit memo processing
• Exception approval routing based on dollar amount
• Exception reporting and batch approvals

Once invoice items have been matched and approved, they can be grouped into payment batches for processing. Accounting teams can select invoices by vendor, due date, or other criteria, making it easy to process payments in bulk.

When you're ready to pay, simply mark the batch as paid and enter check numbers or payment details. For QuickBooks and other accounting systems, SurveyKing can automatically export payment information, import batch IDs, generate check numbers, or integrate directly with your accounting workflow. We can also support custom payment processes, including printing and mailing checks on your behalf.

Features include:

• Select invoices by vendor
• Filter by due date or payment date
• Partial statement payments
• Pay individual invoices or line items
• Preview payment batches before processing
• Export payment files to your accounting system
• Payment history
• Outstanding payment reporting

SurveyKing's Accounts Payable Automation software starts at $2,000 for implementation and $200 per month for up to 1,000 invoice items processed per month. Our team works with you to configure imports, approval workflows, matching rules, and integrations to fit your existing accounting processes.

The pricing above is intended as a general starting point. Every implementation is different, so we'll schedule a quick call to understand your workflow and provide an accurate quote. Factors such as ERP integrations, vendor formats, approval workflows, custom matching rules, reporting requirements, and processing volume all affect implementation effort and pricing.