Accounts payable
Accounting reconciliation: invoices, credit notes and payments cleared, open items explained before the close
Accounting reconciliation on the supplier side means tying every invoice, credit note and payment to its matching ledger entry, then clearing. Zylio’s Matching agent reads your accounting exports, proposes the clearing with its confidence level and presents the open items already qualified: payment without invoice, duplicate payment, credit note not applied. You approve in your own tool.
The problem
Clearing happens at month end, when there is the least time
Accounts payable has two threads to hold together: what suppliers invoiced, and what the company paid. Between the two, the entries: an invoice posted, a credit note booked, a transfer issued. Accounting reconciliation means tying each movement to its counterpart and clearing what balances. When everything corresponds (one invoice, one payment, the same amount), the ERP clears on its own.
The rest piles up. A grouped transfer that settles twelve invoices minus one credit note. A partial payment. An early-payment discount taken without being agreed. An invoice paid twice, under two references. A credit note booked and never applied to the invoice it corrected. Those entries stay open, and it is at month end, when the close is pressing, that they must be explained one by one.
Accounting reconciliation by an AI agent does not replace your ERP’s clearing. It takes the open items the ERP could not pair, explains them, proposes the clearing, and you approve it in your own tool.
What is reconciled
Three links accounts payable has to hold
The invoice and its purchase entry
The document received from the supplier and the entry posted to the purchase journal: same amount, same supplier, same document date, same allocation. A gap here is a keying error or an invoice posted twice.
The credit note and the original invoice
A credit note corrects a specific invoice. Tying it means finding that invoice, checking that the amount matches the dispute settled, and making sure it is deducted from the next payment.
The payment and the invoice or invoices
A transfer may settle one invoice, twelve, or eleven and a credit note. Tying it means rebuilding the composition of the payment, line by line, until the supplier account balances.
The mechanism
How the Matching agent reconciles and proposes the clearing
- 01
Read the accounting exports
Supplier ledger, purchase journal, payment journal, as an export or through an API, from SAP, Sage, Oracle, Microsoft Dynamics 365, NetSuite, Cegid or Workday. Zylio reads; it writes nothing into the system.
- 02
Pair the movements
By exact amount first, then by combination of amounts, document reference, date, and semantic reading of descriptions: an invoice number truncated in a transfer description is recognised as such.
- 03
Propose the clearing with its confidence
Each proposed match carries a confidence level and its justification: which movements, which amounts, why they balance. Above the threshold you set, the proposal is ready to approve; below it, it is presented for arbitration.
- 04
Qualify the open items
Whatever does not clear comes out with a reason: payment without invoice, overdue invoice without payment, probable duplicate payment, credit note not applied, amount gap explained or not. Nothing is dismissed silently.
What the agents read, what they return, and what they never write into the ERP.
What the agent qualifies
Six open items, each with its reason
The payment without an invoice
A transfer issued that no posted invoice explains. Down payment provided by the contract, invoice not yet received, or payment in error: the agent looks for the document and says what it finds.
The overdue invoice without payment
Posted, past due, never paid. Held for a known dispute, forgotten, or paid under another reference: the reason changes what happens next.
The probable duplicate payment
Two payments for the same amount, same supplier, a few days apart, or one invoice posted under two numbers. Presented before it becomes a refund request.
The credit note not applied
Booked, never deducted from a payment. The agent ties it to the original invoice and flags it at the supplier’s next payment.
The amount gap
Discount taken, bank charges deducted, conversion rounding, retention: a gap of a few euros between invoice and payment, explained when it can be, raised when it cannot.
The invoice not yet received
A receipt or a committed order with no invoice posted at the close. The agent lists it with the expected amount, for the accrual.
What it changes
What changes when accounting reconciliation does not wait for the close
The close starts with open items explained, not with a list to explore. Invoices not yet received are known with their amount, pending credit notes are tied, probable duplicate payments are pulled before the next payment run. On the scopes analysed, 15 to 45% of time handed back to teams, per FTE, depending on the scope and the maturity of the data: handed back on the search, not on the approval.
The supplier account reflects reality. A balance made of identified invoices, tied credit notes and rebuilt payments is a balance you can confirm to the supplier, accrue, or dispute. The aged balance stops being an estimate.
The audit trail exists with no extra effort. Each proposed clearing keeps its justification, each approval keeps its author and date, each open item keeps its reason. The statutory auditor asking how a payment was tied gets the answer, documents attached, without reconstruction after the fact.
Invoice matching compares the invoice with the order and the receipt: it verifies that what is invoiced was ordered and received. AI invoice reconciliation takes the gaps found and carries them to a decision. Accounting reconciliation comes after: it ties documents to entries and payments to invoices, and clears. All three rely on the same reading of the documents and the same trail: the line, its evidence, its decision.
The use case: open items qualified before the last day of the month.
Matching
Purchase order, goods receipt and invoice matching, automated.
Matches the three documents line by line and applies your tolerances by supplier, by purchasing category and by amount.
Compliant cases go through on their own. The others arrive qualified, with the discrepancy already costed.
What Matching detects
- Quantity discrepancies
- Partial receipts, deliveries split or grouped
- Units of measure to convert
- Diverging item references
- Additional charges absent from the purchase order
- Invoicing before the goods were actually received
Nothing is lost. Everything can be checked, everything can be proven.
- The contract clause and the invoice line, highlighted side by side.
- Every extracted value stays linked to the exact place in the document where it was read.
- The same case produces the same decision, today as in six months: the rules are applied deterministically.
- No discrepancy is set aside in silence. Anything that matches no rule is raised, with its reason.
- The agent records what it did, in the order it did it: who, what, how much, when.
Frequently asked questions
What is the difference between accounting reconciliation and invoice matching?
Invoice matching confronts purchasing documents (order, receipt, invoice) to verify what is owed. Accounting reconciliation confronts entries: the invoice posted, the credit note booked, the payment issued, to clear the supplier account. The first happens before payment, the second around the close.
Does Zylio clear entries directly in my ERP?
No. Zylio reads your accounting exports, proposes the clearing with its justification and confidence level, and you approve in your own tool. No entry, no clearing, no payment goes through Zylio. That is what guarantees that the system of record remains yours.
How does the agent rebuild a grouped transfer?
It looks for the combination of posted invoices and credit notes for that supplier whose sum matches the amount paid, using the references present in the transfer description and the due dates. It presents the composition found, with its confidence; if several combinations are possible, it shows them all.
What data is needed to get started?
An export of the supplier ledger, the purchase journal and the payment journal over the chosen period, and the corresponding invoices if you want to go down to line level. That is the scope of the 3-week diagnostic, with no connection to your system and no data used to train a model.
Measurable impact in every environment
More than 5 million procurement documents analysed
Between 1 and 7% of margin recovered
on the scope analysed
From 15 to 45% of time given back to teams, per FTE
depending on the scope and on data maturity
Zylio fits into your existing ecosystem.
The ERP runs the process. Zylio handles the exception and recovers the value that escapes it: invoices without a purchase order, line-by-line price discrepancies, duplicates and overbilling, off-contract spend.
Your data under high security.
Zylio meets the most demanding standards, and nothing is committed without your approval.
- Certifications
- Hosting
- Encryption
- Access
The other situations handled by the Matching agent
- Matching purchasing documentsThe matching pillar: order, receipt, invoice, at line level.
- Invoice reconciliationThe invoice matched to the order and the receipt, line by line, with your tolerances and the gap already quantified.
- Firm up provisions and accrualsThe use case: invoices not yet received known with their amount.
- See accounting reconciliation in a demoA ledger export, payments, open items: the agent on screen.
See what this looks like on your own data
Twenty minutes, on a spend category of your choosing. We show you what the agents detect, with the evidence behind it.
- No commitment, on your own data
- Result in 3 weeks
- 20 minutes, no sales pitch
- Your data stays hosted in France
- No change of tool or process