Accounts payable automation, built as an AI agent on your own books.

It means software does the repeated steps of handling vendor invoices. It collects them, reads the details, checks them against the purchase order and the receipt, chooses the accounts, sends each one to the right approver and enters the bill in your accounting system. People still decide what is approved and paid. Accounts payable, or AP, is the money a business owes its vendors and the work of paying it.

Work through the steps in order. First, send every invoice to one mailbox. Second, have software read each invoice into fields. Third, check for duplicates, an unknown vendor or changed bank details. Fourth, match the invoice to its purchase order and receipt. Fifth, set the coding rules. Sixth, set who approves what. Last, post approved bills to your accounting system. Try the tools built into that system before you buy or build anything.

There are seven steps. Receive the invoice and log it. Confirm it is from a vendor you know and has not been entered before. Match it to the purchase order and to the record of what was received. Code each line to an account. Send it to the person who can approve it. Enter the approved bill in the ledger. Pay it by its due date in your normal payment run, and keep the original file with the bill.

It compares three documents before a bill is approved. The purchase order says what you agreed to buy and at what price. The receipt says what arrived. The vendor's invoice says what you are being charged. If quantity and price agree within the tolerance you set, the bill moves on. If they do not, a person looks at it. A two-way match leaves out the receipt.

It depends on your size and your accounting system, so we group by buyer and rank nothing. Small teams on QuickBooks Online or Xero can start with the bill tools built into those systems, then look at Melio or BILL. Teams that want cards and bills in one place look at Ramp. Companies with an ERP and purchase orders look at AvidXchange, Stampli or Tipalti, and NetSuite users at Zone & Co. We have not tested these products. The list on this page restates each maker's own page.

These are list prices from the makers' own pages, read on 11 Oct 2026. QuickBooks Bill Pay runs from $0 to $45 a month. Melio's first three plans run from $0 to $55 a month. BILL runs from $49 to $89 per user per month. Ramp lists a free plan and a Plus plan at $15 per user per month with a platform fee on top. Tipalti starts at $99 a month plus transaction pricing. Stampli, AvidXchange, Vic.ai and Zone & Co gave no price on the pages we read.

No. FactoryJet is a services company. We design, build and support an AI agent on your own accounting system, and you own what we build. There is no FactoryJet app to log in to. If you are shopping for a product to switch on this week, the nine listed on this page are the place to start, and we are glad to tell you which one we would look at in your place.

When most of your bills have no purchase order behind them, your approval rules fit a settings screen, you have one company file, and you want to pay vendors in the same tool. A product also wins on speed, since Melio and Ramp each list a free plan you can try today. A built agent earns its place when orders or receipts live in a second system, when your rules come from contracts, or when you run several ledgers.

There is no neutral ranking. On 11 Oct 2026 the first page of US Google results for accounts payable automation software showed pages from Zone & Co, Concur, Tipalti, Medius, HighRadius, Paylocity, AvidXchange and NetSuite, plus Gartner's review page and a video. A first-page result shows who invests in search, which is a different thing from who fits your invoices. Shortlist by your accounting system and your invoice volume, then ask each maker for a trial on your own bills.

Yes, for capture and payment. Intuit says you can email or upload invoices to QuickBooks and AI creates pre-filled bills with dates, terms, category and line items for you to review. Bill Pay Basic is included with a QuickBooks subscription, and rules that require sign-off before money moves come with Bill Pay Elite. Matching each bill against a purchase order and a receipt kept in another system is the usual reason to add something to it.

Yes. Intuit's Bill Pay page says you can pay several vendors at a time, combine several bills into one payment and set fixed monthly bills on autopay, with free standard ACH. Autopay suits rent and subscriptions, where the amount does not change. For bills that vary, keep a person on the approval. The agents we build stop at the approved bill, so the payment run stays in QuickBooks with your team.

Partly. Xero says its AI extracts the key details from an uploaded or forwarded bill and creates a draft bill ready for approval, that it flags duplicate bills, and that standard ACH bill payments are included in its business plans. Its Early plan lists 5 bills. For approval chains and purchase order matching, Xero's App Store has a collection of AP apps. A custom agent writes to Xero through its API, which accepts bills as draft or submitted.

Yes, in parts. Bill Capture reads an emailed or uploaded vendor bill and drafts it for review, and Oracle says it is available only in the United States. The 3 Way Match workflow checks a bill against its purchase order and item receipt. Intelligent Payment Automation, powered by BILL, pays vendors in US dollars. Our NetSuite AI agents page covers these in more detail, along with Oracle's AI Connector Service.

Yes. Odoo's documentation says it uses OCR and artificial intelligence to read a bill and fill in the record, and that each PDF emailed to the purchase journal's address becomes a draft vendor bill. Odoo describes purchase order matching after that as a manual step. With 3-way matching switched on, each bill shows a Should Be Paid field. An agent adds the matching and the vendor checks around what Odoo already reads.

Yes. SAP's Service Layer, the API for SAP Business One, lists purchase invoices, purchase orders, drafts and approval requests. It also lists PurchaseDeliveryNotes, which SAP describes as the document showing that a shipment or delivery has occurred. An agent reads the order and that document, then creates the purchase invoice or a draft of it for your approval process. FactoryJet has worked on SAP Business One.

No. It changes what the day is spent on. The built-in tools are designed around a person. QuickBooks and Xero both draft a bill for someone to review, and NetSuite's Bill Capture puts each scanned bill on a review page. The agents we build follow the same line. They read and match, and they flag what does not fit. Your AP team handles the exceptions, approves the bills, pays them and looks after the vendors.

Not by itself. Out of the box, a chat app does not know your chart of accounts, your vendors or your approval rules, and it waits for someone to type. It can answer questions and draft entries, but nothing checks its work. The same kind of AI model does useful accounting work inside a proper setup, one with a limited sign-in to your books, written rules, a log of what it did and a person approving the result.

It depends on your vendors, so we do not quote one figure. Product makers quote their own. Ramp and BILL each state 99% on their pages. Clean PDF invoices read well. Phone photos, handwriting and long statements read worse. Before launch we run a sample of your own past invoices through the agent and count how often each field matches what your team entered. After launch, a person checks any field the agent is unsure of.

It is $2,000. The IRS instructions say you file Form 1099-NEC for each person you paid at least $2,000 during the year for services in the course of your business. The threshold increased for tax years beginning after 2025 and may be adjusted for inflation from calendar year 2027. The agent keeps a running total per vendor, so the list is ready in January. Ask your CPA how the rule applies to you.

Collect one before the first payment to any vendor you may have to report, and ask your CPA which vendors are exempt. IRS Form W-9 is how a vendor gives you a correct taxpayer identification number. The IRS lists a payee who did not provide a correct number among the cases where a payer must withhold 24 percent from future payments. In our builds, the first bill from a new vendor is held until a W-9 is on file.

By checking the vendor record before the invoice. In the 2026 AFP survey, 76% of organizations reported attempted or actual payments fraud in 2025. Nacha, which writes the ACH rules, gives change controls on vendor payment information as an example of a fraud procedure. In our builds, a new vendor or a bill whose bank details differ from the record stops until a named person calls the vendor on a number already on file.

The IRS says to keep records for 3 years in the general case, for 6 years if income was under-reported by more than 25%, and for 7 years after a bad debt deduction or a loss from worthless securities. State rules and your auditors may ask for longer. The agent attaches the original invoice file to each bill and keeps its log of checks and approvals with it, so the paper and the decision sit together.

No. It stops at the approved bill. Payments stay in your normal process, whether that is QuickBooks Bill Pay, Xero, NetSuite's payment tools, a product such as BILL or your bank portal, with your usual people releasing them. In the 2026 AFP survey, 58% of organizations reported check fraud in 2025, more than ACH or wire. Keeping payment release with a named person is one of the simplest controls there is.

It depends on how many systems the agent reads and writes, and how many rules it follows. US agencies typically charge $5,000 to $15,000 for a single-workflow build such as invoice intake, according to Layer3 Labs' 2026 guide. Development firm ProductCrafters puts custom AI agents of every kind at roughly $5,000 to more than $180,000. Purchase order matching, several entities and a second system move a project up that range. FactoryJet quotes a fixed price in writing after a short scoping call.

We do. FactoryJet quotes the build and the ongoing support as fixed prices in writing after a short scoping call. After launch, the team that built the agent keeps managing the servers, the AI models, the API connections and the upkeep, so your finance team does not have to. That includes re-testing on your sample invoices when your accounting system or the AI model changes. Our AI agent monitoring and support page describes the service.

A pilot on one narrow workflow usually takes two to four weeks. For accounts payable that means one mailbox, your main vendors and draft bills for review. A production agent with permissions, logging, approvals and monitoring usually takes six to twelve weeks. Purchase order matching against a second system and several entities sit at the longer end. Every bill waits for a person at first, so you see results on live invoices before the agent is trusted with more.

Yes. Before a contract, we show working software on your own data. For accounts payable that means a sample of invoices you have already entered, run through a first version of the agent. You compare its drafts with what your team did, field by field, including the purchase orders it matched and the coding it suggested. If a built-in tool or a product would do the job as well, that is the moment we say so.

You do. The agent is built for you and the code is yours, along with the written rules and the test invoices. It can run in your own cloud account. We still look after it day to day, which covers the servers, the AI models, the API connections and the updates. If you later move the work in-house or to another firm, everything goes with you.

The original invoices and the bills stay in your mailbox and your accounting system. To read an invoice, the agent sends it to an AI model. Before the build we name that provider, and every other system that touches your data, in writing, so your security lead can review them. The agent signs in to your accounting system with a user of its own that can create bills and cannot release payments.

Yes, and they should be. We agree the account codes, classes, approval limits and hold rules with your bookkeeper, controller or CPA before the build, and they review the bills the agent flags. Year-end filing, such as Forms 1099-NEC, stays with them. If you are an accounting firm, the same setup can be built per client file, and we also do white-label work for agencies and firms.