Purchasing documents
Purchasing documents: every item read, linked and checkable, from quote to credit note
Purchasing documents are the written trail a supplier expense leaves behind: quote, framework contract, rate card, purchase order, delivery note, invoice, credit note, statement. Zylio collects them in any format, reads them line by line, links each one to the others and turns them into a searchable history. Your teams stop retyping and start checking.
Definition
What counts as a purchasing document
A supplier expense leaves a written trace at every step. Those traces answer each other, but they do not share an author, a format or a filing place.
Quotes and offers
Issued by the supplier before the order. Proposed prices, scope, options, terms. Usually a PDF attached to an email, sometimes a spreadsheet.
Framework contract and rate card
The rate card and the contract set what was negotiated: prices, discounts, volume tiers, revision clauses. This is the reference everything else is checked against.
Purchase order
Issued by your teams, in the ERP or outside it. Quantities, references, expected prices. The document that says what should have been invoiced.
Delivery note and goods receipt
What actually arrived, in what quantity, on what date. Signed on a loading dock, scanned later, sometimes never.
Supplier invoice
What the supplier is claiming. Several pages, dozens of lines, ancillary charges, a currency, one or more tax rates.
Credit note and statement
The correction promised after a dispute, and the supplier’s periodic summary. Both get lost easily between two mailboxes.
The problem
Why these documents stay unused
Each document is readable on its own. Together, they are not: the quote sits in the buyer’s mailbox, the contract on a legal share, the order in the ERP, the invoice in the scanning tool, the delivery note in a binder at the site. Nobody has all six in front of them when the payment goes out.
Format makes it worse. A PDF, a scan, a photo of a delivery slip or a spreadsheet cannot be compared with an ERP line without retyping. So little gets retyped, checks are done by sampling, and payment rests on trust in the contract: unit price gaps, forgotten discounts and added charges go through with everything else.
This is not a tooling failure. An ERP records what is entered into it; it does not read a ten-page PDF. Intelligent processing of purchasing documents starts exactly there: giving each document a shape that can be set against the others.
Mechanism
How Zylio processes a purchasing document
Processing runs from the moment a document arrives to the moment a line can be checked. Every step leaves a trace you can open.
- 01
Collection
Dedicated mailbox, upload, SFTP, scan, API or ERP export. Every format comes in: native PDF, scan, photo, spreadsheet, structured feed.
- 02
Classification
The document is recognised for what it is (quote, invoice, credit note, delivery note) and attached to its supplier, even under a different legal name.
- 03
Line-by-line extraction
References, descriptions, quantities, units, unit prices, discounts, taxes, terms. Multi-page tables are read as a single table.
- 04
Linking
The invoiced line is linked to its order line, its receipt and the contract clause that sets its price. The link is explicit and sourced.
- 05
Checking
What was invoiced is set against what was negotiated and ordered. The gap is quantified, with the page and line of both documents side by side.
- 06
Output
A searchable history, a confidence score per field, and a documented case for each gap. A person approves or closes it; nothing leaves without them.
Formats, accuracy, confidence score, long and multilingual documents.
Agents
Capture, Graph and Insight: read, link and query
Zylio is an orchestration of specialised agents. On purchasing documents, Capture, then Graph and Insight, the two procurement intelligence layers, work one after the other, and each leaves proof of what it did.
Capture
Gathers and reads the documents, whatever the format, and extracts every line. It declares what it could not read rather than estimating it.
DiscoverGraph
Links the documents it has read into a procurement graph: supplier, item, contract, order, invoice. Every relation points back to the document, page and line it came from.
DiscoverInsight
Answers a question asked in plain language from that graph: how much, with whom, under which contract, since when. Every figure opens on its lines.
Discover
Capture, Compare, Compliance, Matching, Exception, Graph, Insight.
Outcome
What changes for your teams
Retyping disappears. A hundred-line invoice is no longer a document skimmed diagonally: every line exists, with its price, quantity and reference, ready to be set against the contract. Checking moves from sampling to exhaustive: from 5% to 100% of your spend verified, on the scope you decide to open.
Purchasing history becomes searchable. When a buyer prepares a renegotiation, they start from what was actually invoiced, line by line, not from the list price. When a controller wants to know why a category is drifting, the answer comes from the documents themselves, with the proof alongside.
The platform absorbs the volume your teams cannot read: over 10,000 supplier documents processed per week, across all formats, languages and structures. The time handed back to the teams, between 15% and 45% per FTE depending on scope and data maturity, goes to negotiation and decisions, not data entry.
Your purchasing data already exists. It is just locked inside PDFs.
What Zylio does not do
Four limits that do not move
Zylio does not touch your ERP: it reads exports and APIs, writes nothing into the system and adds no development to its core. It takes no action (payment, claim, hold) without human approval. It contacts none of your suppliers. It trains no model on your data, which stays hosted in France.
These limits are what makes the control real. An agent that documents a gap and leaves the decision to someone can be verified; a tool that decided for you could not. Zylio builds the case, you make the call.
Hosted in France, ISO 27001, SOC 2 Type II, complete audit trail.
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
Which purchasing document formats does Zylio read?
Native PDF, scan, photo, spreadsheet, structured feed. The layout does not need to be known in advance: a quote with a new presentation or a multi-page invoice in a foreign language is read like any other. Whatever could not be read is declared, with a confidence score, never estimated.
Do I need to change my ERP or my processes to handle purchasing documents with Zylio?
No. Zylio plugs into what exists: SAP, Sage, Oracle, Microsoft Dynamics 365, NetSuite, Cegid, Workday, by export or API. It reads; it changes nothing. Your approval workflows remain yours; Zylio feeds them documented gaps and proof.
What is the difference between this page and OCR?
OCR is the reading step: turning an image or a PDF into text and lines. Processing purchasing documents starts there and keeps going: classifying the document, linking it to its order and contract, quantifying the gap, keeping the proof. The OCR page details the reading; this one describes the whole chain.
What happens when a gap is found?
The gap is quantified and shown with both documents side by side: the clause or order line on one side, the invoiced line on the other. Someone on your team approves, disputes or closes it. Zylio blocks no payment and contacts no supplier on its own.
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
Going further
- OCR and extraction of purchasing documentsReading in detail: formats, accuracy, long documents, multilingual.
- PDF extraction of purchase data for analysisTurning PDFs into structured data, ready for analysis.
- The Capture agentCollection, reading and line-by-line extraction, every format.
- See the platform in a demoOn your own documents, agents and proof 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