The Real Challenge Behind 2- and 3-Way Invoice Matching And why most automation solutions are failing at it

Many organisations struggle to automate 2- and 3-way matching when posting supplier invoices into their finance systems. Why? Because matching flawed data is a guaranteed path to failure.

· Here’s the uncomfortable truth:

· If the invoice data is incorrect (missing PO, wrong SKU, mismatched totals)

· Or if your capture tech uses OCR and misreads characters (e.g. 6 vs 8, B vs 1)

· Then no amount of RPA or AI Agents will fix the problem—they’re just expensive tools acting on bad inputs.

So, what’s the solution?

1. Start with your suppliers. Educate them on what’s required. Ensure your POs contain clear instructions—including mandatory fields like valid PO numbers. This is foundational.

2. Fix the receipting process. For 3-way matching, ensure your goods receipt notes are visible and up to date. Matching can’t happen if the data isn't there.

3. Ditch OCR wherever possible. OCR will never give you 100% accuracy—it’s prone to character errors and formatting limitations. ✅ Instead, ask suppliers to send electronic PDFs. Every finance system can produce one, and with the right technology, you can extract invoice data with 100% character accuracy.

4. Validate and orchestrate at the point of extraction. Don’t just extract data—validate it against sender/receiver profiles, apply business rules, and enrich it via lookups. If it’s right at the source, it’s right downstream.

When you get this right, your AI Agents can finally shine.

An Agentic AI model working with clean, accurate, enriched data can make logical, rules-based decisions—automating what used to take hours of human effort, without exceptions or rework.

This is the future of AP automation. And it starts by solving the real problem: data integrity.

Curious how this works in practice?

Let’s talk about how we’re helping businesses unlock true invoice automation—no OCR, no rework, no surprises