Automate Vendor Statement Reconciliation
When a vendor sends a periodic statement of everything they believe is outstanding, someone in AP has to compare it line by line against what's actually in the ledger — checking each invoice appears, each payment is reflected, and chasing down the gaps where the vendor shows a balance your system doesn't, or vice versa. This is slow, tedious, and usually only gets done for a handful of key vendors because there simply isn't time to do it for all of them, which means discrepancies on smaller or less-scrutinized vendor accounts go unnoticed for months.
STARTING PRICE
From €299
Standard tier · Multi-step workflow with AI extraction/decisioning and 2-3 integrations.
Get a quote →Saves roughly 4-6 hrs/week for a mid-sized AP team.
How the automation works
We build a matching process that ingests each vendor statement, whatever format it arrives in, and automatically compares every line against your AP ledger for that vendor — matching by invoice number, amount and date where possible, and using fuzzy matching where the vendor's reference doesn't exactly align with yours. Matched lines are cleared automatically; discrepancies are categorized by type (invoice on statement but missing from ledger, payment on ledger not reflected on statement, amount mismatch) so a reviewer can work through a short, sorted exception list instead of re-deriving the whole comparison from scratch.
Process flow
- 01
Vendor statement received trigger
Statements arriving by email or portal download are picked up and queued for reconciliation as they come in, on whatever cadence each vendor sends them.
- 02
Extract statement lines ai
Individual invoice and payment lines are extracted from the statement regardless of the vendor's own format or layout.
- 03
Match against AP ledger ai
Each line is matched to your AP ledger by invoice number, amount and date, with fuzzy matching applied where references don't align exactly.
- 04
Categorize discrepancies ai
Unmatched lines are sorted into discrepancy types — missing invoice, unreflected payment, amount mismatch — rather than presented as one undifferentiated list.
- 05
Deliver exception list output
A short, categorized exception list is delivered for review, with the matched majority cleared automatically and not requiring any attention.
Inputs
- Vendor statements (PDF, portal export, email)
- AP ledger / open and paid invoice history
- Vendor master data
- Payment run history
Outputs
- Reconciled vendor statement summary
- Categorized discrepancy exception list
- Missing-invoice alerts
- Statement-to-ledger match rate by vendor
Works with
Prefer a fully custom build instead of an off-the-shelf integration? We scope both options during your free consultation — most jobs like this one work fine on standard connectors, but higher-volume or non-standard systems sometimes need bespoke API work, reflected in the complex tier.
Where this goes wrong if you get it wrong
- Payment timing differences are the single biggest source of false discrepancies — a payment sent five days before the vendor's statement cutoff may not appear on their statement yet even though it's already reflected in your ledger, so timing needs to be a recognized category, not treated as a real mismatch.
- Vendors sometimes include invoices on their statement that were disputed and never approved on your side — these should surface as a distinct 'disputed, not in our ledger by design' category rather than an alarming missing-invoice flag.
- Statement formats change vendor to vendor and sometimes month to month for the same vendor (a new billing system on their end) — the extraction needs to handle layout drift gracefully rather than silently misreading columns after a format change.
- A statement showing a credit balance for your company (the vendor owes you, from an overpayment or return) needs explicit handling separate from a normal aging discrepancy, since treating it as just another unmatched line buries a potential refund opportunity.
Frequently asked questions
What if a vendor's statement format changes or is unusual?
The extraction is built to handle varied and changing layouts, and any statement it can't confidently parse is flagged for manual review rather than silently misread.
How does this distinguish real discrepancies from timing differences?
Payment timing relative to the statement cutoff date is factored into the matching logic, so a payment made just before a statement was generated doesn't get flagged as a real mismatch.
Can this reconcile statements for every vendor, not just our largest ones?
Yes — because the matching is automated, it scales to every vendor sending statements, not just the handful a manual process would have time to check.
What happens when we find a genuine discrepancy?
It's surfaced in the categorized exception list with the specific type of mismatch and supporting detail, so your AP team can resolve it directly with the vendor without re-deriving the comparison themselves.