Most finance teams in South Africa do not have an accounts payable problem. They have three smaller problems that add up to one: invoices arrive in too many places, nobody can see where an invoice is waiting, and matching the invoice to the order and the delivery is done by hand. Accounts payable automation fixes all three, but only if you tackle them in the right order.
1. Start with capture, not approvals
The first instinct is usually to automate approvals, because that is where the delays are most visible. But if invoices still arrive by email, WhatsApp, courier and the occasional photo on a phone, an approval workflow just moves the chaos one step further down the line.
Start by giving every supplier invoice one way in:
- A dedicated accounts payable mailbox that the system reads automatically
- Scanning for paper invoices, with each page read by OCR
- Upload for anything that arrives another way
Modern capture uses AI to read any supplier's layout, so you do not have to build a template for every supplier. It can also split a scanned batch of several invoices into separate documents, which removes one of the most tedious jobs in the department.
2. Check the invoice before anyone approves it
An approver should only see an invoice that is complete and correct. Before it reaches a person, the system should check:
- That it is a valid tax invoice. SARS requires a full tax invoice when the value is more than R5 000, showing the words "Tax Invoice", "VAT Invoice" or "Invoice", the supplier's name, address and VAT number, the recipient's name, address and VAT number where the recipient is a vendor, a serial number and date, a description, the quantity, and the value with the VAT amount.
- That it is not a duplicate of an invoice already captured or paid.
- That it matches the purchase order and what was actually received.
The third check is called three way matching, and it is where most of the money is saved. We explain it in detail in our guide to three way matching.
3. Route approvals by amount, not by habit
Once an invoice is clean, approvals become simple. Set approval limits in a table: below a certain value the department manager approves, above it the financial manager, above that a director. Small invoices that match fully can be approved automatically, so your people only look at the invoices that need a decision.
Keep the limits in a table that finance can change without a developer. Approval structures change with every promotion and restructure, and the workflow must keep up.
4. Make reconciliation part of the process
Month end is where manual accounts payable hurts most: supplier statements arrive, and someone has to tick them off against the ledger line by line. If your system already holds every invoice, credit note and payment, it can read the supplier statement and reconcile it for you, showing exactly what is matched, what is different, what has not been received and what is still in the approval workflow. See our guide to supplier statement reconciliation.
5. Keep the audit trail without trying
Every document, value change and approval should be kept automatically, with the person and the time. That is what makes an external audit or a SARS query a matter of minutes instead of days. It also matters for POPIA, because supplier and employee records contain personal information that must be protected and kept only as long as needed.
What a realistic timeline looks like
With a platform like BCMFlow, built on DocMGT, accounts payable automation goes live in weeks, not months. The timeline is agreed in writing after a free discovery session, and the work runs in two week sprints with a working demo at every checkpoint, so you see progress long before go live.
Where to go from here
If you are weighing up accounts payable automation, map your current process first: where invoices arrive, who touches them, and where they wait. That map tells you where to start.
See how BCMFlow handles accounts payable, or book a free 30 minute consultation and bring a supplier statement. We will show you how it reconciles.
Anriët Pretorius
General Manager