Accounts Payable (AP) teams often have to wrestle with manual, repetitive work. This includes everything from entering invoice data and chasing approvals, to reconciling payments across multiple systems.
It’s a process prone to delays, errors, and inefficiencies, especially as invoice volumes rise and finance teams are stretched across disconnected tools and growing workloads. These structural pressures make it harder to maintain visibility and slow down financial decision-making. But recently, AI and automation are transforming how finance teams manage their AP workflows.
AI and automation are now able to streamline core workflows across the AP process, from data extraction and document management, to approval routing. While so-called ‘touchless payables’ are still difficult to achieve, implementing AI throughout the AP process enables more efficiency, with no trade off between accuracy, speed, and security.
That’s not to say that AI is fully taking over from people. It’s acting in a complementary way, helping unlock efficiency and give finance teams more time to use elsewhere.
According to Deloitte, 48% of a surveyed group of strategy-influencing finance leaders↗ say they have already fully integrated AI agents into specific areas of the finance function. Behind this trend is a clear motivation for faster processing, fewer errors, and real-time insight into company spend, that is simply not possible with manual AP.
In this article we’ll explore how AI automates accounts payable workflows, and why intelligent platforms like Moss are helping bring AP efficiency to businesses across the UK and Europe.
What AI does in accounts payable
When it comes to AI’s role in accounts payable↗, standards and capabilities are changing rapidly. In the space of a few years, we’ve reached a point where AI is now making almost every aspect of AP faster, and smarter.
JP Morgan↗ says that AP automation can help alleviate a wide range of problems associated with manual invoice processing, including minimising human error, boosting efficiency, improving visibility, expanding scalability, strengthening security and improving vendor engagement.
AI can learn from patterns, detect anomalies, and help integrate workflows seamlessly with the rest of your finance ecosystem. Let’s break down how AI can power each stage of the AP workflow specifically.
a. Invoice capture & data extraction
AI replaces manual data entry with intelligent document processing. Using optical character recognition (OCR) and natural language processing (NLP), it scans invoices from emails, PDFs, or photos, and extracts key information. This includes:
- Vendor and details and tax IDs
- Line items, descriptions, and amounts
- VAT codes, currencies, and due dates
Over time, a model learns the specific document and coding formats associated with your vendors, achieving near-100% accuracy. This reliably and consistently frees your finance team from one of the most repetitive AP-related data entry tasks.
b. Invoice coding & validation
Following on from the data extraction phase, machine learning takes the next step, automatically assigning invoices to the right GL codes, cost centres, and projects.
AI in accounts payable uses data-driven models to automate repetitive finance processes, reduce errors, and improve decision-making.
It learns patterns from historical invoices, payments and vendors and checks against purchase orders↗, flagging issues such as:
- Duplicate invoices
- Suspicious totals or mismatched currencies
- Incorrect tax rates or missing VAT details
For finance teams, this proactive validation dramatically reduces the risk of fraud and compliance errors before approval even begins.
c. Approval workflows
AI can automate the approval chain, ensuring that policies are enforced consistently. Invoices are routed automatically based on:
- Department or cost centre
- Spend thresholds
- Company approval hierarchies
When integrated with an HRIS platform, approval workflows can become even more adaptive. For example, if an approver is on leave, the system reroutes to the next most appropriate approver instantly. Meanwhile, smart reminders reduce delays and human-in-the-loop oversight guarantees transparency and control.
d. Payments & reconciliation
Once an invoice has been fully approved, automation tools help streamline the final payment process. Instead of manually preparing payment runs, the system can generate them automatically based on due dates, vendor terms, and your internal payment policies.
Payments can then be executed through secure integrations with your banking system via SEPA or BACS—always with final human approval where required.
All transactions sync in real time with your ERP or accounting platform, whether that’s Xero, Sage, NetSuite, or DATEV, ensuring complete visibility across entities, currencies, and bank accounts. This closes the loop between invoice approval, payment execution, and financial reporting.
AI can even optimise payment timing based on cash flow↗ forecasts, choosing early-payment discounts where beneficial and maintaining liquidity elsewhere.
e. Analytics & insights
Moving onto data, AI is able to turn all sorts of data and insights into actionable intelligence. By integrating AI with your AP data and other key financial dashboards, you can get:
- Real-time spend visibility
- Anomaly detection on vendor activity
- Trend forecasting for cash flow management
With a capable, central spend management system and relevant complementary dashboards, finance teams gain a single source of truth, allowing them to make faster, data-led decisions.
As these capabilities evolve, the role of AI in accounts payable is shifting from automation to augmentation. Finance teams are no longer just processing transactions, they’re managing an intelligent ecosystem that learns, adapts, and drives continuous improvement.
In short, AI doesn’t just help finance teams work faster; it helps them work smarter, turning accounts payable into a real-time strategic function at the heart of modern business.
How AI transforms finance team workflows
While automation is the primary use case of AI, its impact goes far beyond that. It can reshape how finance teams themselves work, collaborate, and deliver value.
From admin to advisory
Finance professionals often cite manual data entry and error correction as one of the most time consuming day-to-day tasks they face. Although these tasks are a fundamental part of sound finance work, they’re a prime candidate for automation by AI and machine learning.
Instead of chasing invoices, AI-powered workflows allow finance professionals to focus on strategic work like forecasting, budgeting, and vendor optimisation. AI becomes an analyst’s assistant, surfacing insights they might otherwise miss, and doing the repetitive data entry they’d rather not.
By removing the burden of repetitive, manual finance tasks from finance professionals, AI can free them up for work that drives real impact for the business.
Real-time collaboration
With a modern, AI-driven spend management platform, everyone from finance to procurement works in the same environment. Stakeholders can see invoice statuses, comments, and approvals in real time, fostering accountability and transparency across departments.
Confidence in compliance
For UK and EU organisations, compliance is non-negotiable. But adhering to high standards requires a lot of work and care. AI can aid in ensuring VAT accuracy, supporting Making Tax Digital (MTD) submissions, and maintaining full GDPR compliance through secure, traceable workflows. Every step is logged from invoice receipt to payment, creating a verifiable audit trail.
When given the right per-market or per-country regulatory context, AI can cross-reference documents and workflows against local regulations automatically. While AI shouldn’t be left to work independently on this type of important regulatory or compliance work, it can save significant amounts of time when managed with human oversight.
Employee empowerment
Last but not least, AI empowers finance teams to evolve from reactive processors to proactive business partners. Far from worries about AI replacing finance teams, it actually elevates their role within the business by freeing them up to work on more valuable work. It’s a matter of technology handling the routine, while the humans focus on insight, rather than input.
How can we quantify the benefits of AI in AP?
When it comes to quantifying the benefits of AI and automation in AP, many businesses that have already implemented these systems report positive results.
According to Oracle Netsuite↗, AI AP automation enables best-in-class organisations to process payments 81% faster with AI support.
These figures are replicated across a range of different aspects of finance and AP performance. All of this shows that the shift to AI automation isn’t just theoretical, it’s measurable and immediate.
Businesses implementing AI-powered AP platforms report the following:
AI-driven systems not only accelerate processes but also strengthen financial governance, giving CFOs confidence in every transaction.
How to implement AI in your AP workflows
Moving to an AI-enabled AP system doesn’t require months of change management. Modern solutions are built for fast, seamless integration. To get started quickly, consider the following:
Integration-first
When you evaluate AI-enabled AP platforms, you should prioritise tools that integrate natively with your ERP and accounting systems (for example Xero↗, Sage, NetSuite↗ or DATEV↗) and offer true two-way syncing.
The platform should pull in supplier records, chart of accounts, tax codes and dimensions so that pre-accounting work happens on clean, consistent master data. Just as importantly, it should push approved invoices, allocations and payment statuses back into your ERP automatically to keep reconciliation and reporting accurate and up to date.
Critically, some solutions only sync in one direction and still rely on manual exports, whereas Moss provides full two-way DATEV sync to avoid those gaps.
Fast go-live
Deployment and setup times can vary, but most modern spend management and AP platforms take 2 to 4 weeks. While immediate rollout isn’t realistic, prioritise vendors that offer guided onboarding, clear data migration support, and minimal infrastructure setup. The goal is to see early wins within the first month, not wait for long-term returns.
Scalability
AI itself is great at adapting to change and scaling dependencies, but the infrastructure around it also needs to be scalable. Ensure you select a platform that offers multi-entity, multi-currency environments as these are ideal for SMEs at various stages of growth.
Scalable infrastructure future proofs your AP workflow as transaction volumes and business complexity grow.
Change Management
Prioritise solutions that offer intuitive interfaces, guided workflows, and transparent AI explanations. When users understand why an AI model suggests a coding or approval route, they’re far more likely to trust and adopt it.
Security & Compliance
Your AP automation platform should adhere to the highest standards of data protection and regulatory compliance. That means:
- End-to-end encryption for all data in transit and at rest.
- GDPR-compliant architecture, built with privacy by design.
- Role-based access control, ensuring only authorised users handle sensitive information.
- Comprehensive audit logs for every transaction and approval step.
How Moss takes it further
While many platforms offer pieces of AP automation, Moss brings the entire spend lifecycle together. Designed specifically for EU and UK finance teams, Moss unifies invoices, corporate cards, reimbursements, and budgets into one intelligent ecosystem — giving finance leaders a complete, real-time view of company spend across entities, currencies, and teams.
Unified spend platform
Moss doesn’t just automate accounts payable; it connects AP with other types of employee and company spend in a single platform with shared rules and workflows. By combining invoice management, reimbursements, and smart corporate cards, Moss creates a seamless end-to-end flow, from purchase to payment to reporting. The result: fewer systems to manage, fewer data silos, and a single source of truth for finance.
Advanced AI
Moss’ AI goes beyond automation to deliver real intelligence. It auto-matches purchase orders, flags anomalies in supplier behaviour, routes invoices to the correct approver, and enforces policies consistently across every department. Instead of forcing your processes into rigid workflows, Moss adapts to how your organisation actually operates, ensuring control without complexity.
The new role of finance
AI is redefining finance from a back-office function to a strategic driver of business performance. Invoices no longer sit in inboxes — they move, process, and reconcile themselves, creating a constant flow of insight.
Finance teams using intelligent platforms like Moss don’t just close the books faster — they see the bigger picture sooner. They become catalysts for growth, equipped with the clarity and confidence to lead with data.
Moss bridges the gap between automation and intelligence helping UK and European businesses turn AP from a cost centre into a strategic advantage.
