A 140-person electrical contractor was paying $640,000 a month to 90 active suppliers and subcontractors. Their accounts payable team of three was holding 180 invoices they could not process, some over 60 days old, all stuck in some version of a mismatch.
Their finance director asked me a fair question, so let me answer it the way I answered her. These are the four questions I hear most, and the answers are less about software than most people expect.
Question one: if the purchase order is correct, why does the match fail?
Because the purchase order was usually correct and the delivery was usually not. In this case, 71 of the 180 stuck invoices involved partial deliveries. A purchase order for 400 meters of cable arrives as 250 meters on Tuesday and 150 on Friday, and the paper delivery note says “400” because the supplier writes the total order on the note.
Receiving records 250. The invoice claims 400. The match fails. Nobody is wrong, and the invoice sits for a month.
Question two: how do you handle prices that were never on the order?
Subcontractor work is where this bites hardest. A rate gets agreed on the phone, work gets done, the invoice arrives, and the rate was never entered anywhere. Roughly 30% of this contractor’s mismatches came from verbal rates.
The fix was unglamorous. Any verbal rate agreement gets entered as a purchase order within 24 hours, even if the work already happened. A blank order with a good description beats a dispute two months later. If it is not written down before the work starts, you are not buying, you are guessing.
Question three: what should the tolerance be?
Zero tolerance sounds disciplined and creates a bottleneck. We set three rules instead:
- Quantity variance under 2% on the order line: auto-match, no human review.
- Price variance under $150 total: match, but notify the buyer in a weekly digest.
- Anything else: hold, and tell the supplier the same day what is missing.
That last step mattered more than the tolerances. Telling the supplier on the same day, instead of six weeks later, closed 62 invoices in the first month because the supplier could just send a corrected document.
Question four: is this a software problem at all?
Partly. ERPNext Consulting rewrote the approval flow so purchase orders above $5,000 needed a second signature, and receiving against a purchase order became a required field rather than an optional one. That removed the manual matching for about 80% of invoices.
But the bigger change was a short Monday meeting between the buyer and the receiving clerk, covering every open order not received in full. Twenty minutes, four people, and the number of stuck invoices dropped from 180 to 31 within two months.
ERPNext Consulting also set up a weekly aged mismatch report that goes to the finance director, not to accounts payable. When the people creating the mismatch see the report, the mismatch gets fixed at the source.
Try this next week. Pull every invoice older than 30 days that has not been paid and group them by reason rather than by supplier. Most contractors find two or three reasons explain three quarters of the pile, and neither of them is the software.