Understanding the Problem

The client, a Mumbai-based personal-care brand, runs its finance operations on SAP. Every month its accounts payable (AP) team hit the same wall: invoices arrived from six separate vendor portals and a shared inbox, each one had to be keyed into SAP by hand, and GRNs (Goods Receipt Notes) were posted manually against purchase orders. Mismatches — wrong quantities, wrong rates, invoices billed against POs that were never fully received — usually surfaced only after the payment had already gone out, and recovering a wrong payment meant weeks of vendor follow-up.

Monday mornings were entirely consumed clearing the weekend's invoice backlog, and month-end close routinely slipped because the team was still reconciling AP.

What We Built

We designed and deployed an AI agent that runs live inside the brand's own SAP environment and owns the full invoice-to-GRN workflow end-to-end:

• Ingests invoices automatically — pulls PDFs and line-item data from all six vendor portals and the shared inbox, with no manual downloading or forwarding.

• Reads and extracts line items — parses invoice line items, quantities, and rates directly from the source documents.

• Runs a three-way match — cross-checks each invoice against its purchase order and the goods actually received, the same check an AP clerk does by hand.

• Posts clean GRNs on its own — where the invoice, PO, and goods receipt line up, the agent posts the GRN directly into SAP with zero human involvement.

• Flags exceptions with the reason why — where something's off, it holds the document, states the specific discrepancy, and routes it to the AP team for a one-click approve or reject.

Every action the agent takes is logged and auditable, and no invoice data ever leaves the client's systems — the agent runs inside their existing SAP and email stack rather than exporting data to a third party. We took this from kickoff to live in production in 1–2 weeks, with no custom middleware and no changes to the existing SAP setup.

Outcome

The AP team no longer spends month-end clearing a backlog. Clean invoices post themselves the same day they arrive. Between going live in January 2026 and early September, the agent read 252 invoice emails, parsed 1,156 invoices and posted 1,091 GRNs to SAP without anyone keying them in, so 94% of invoices went straight through. Every mismatch is now caught before payment leaves the account instead of after. What used to be a full morning of manual reconciliation is now a 15-minute review of whatever the agent has flagged.

Still running, and still changing

The GRN agent has run continuously since January 2026. In June 2026 the client added a second agent that creates purchase orders and emails them to vendors. It had sent 143 POs by early September. When vendors change their invoice layouts, the GRN agent adapts without breaking. When the operations team needed a "desired date" column on generated POs, we added it without redesigning the workflow.

"Monday mornings were just for clearing the invoice backlog. Now I check what the agent flagged and that takes 15 minutes."

-Operations Manager, personal-care brand, India