Every day, a stack of invoices lands in the accounting inbox. For each invoice, someone has to find the corresponding purchase order, check the supplier's order confirmation — and only then approve or escalate. With 50, 100 or 500 documents daily, this consumes enormous capacity. And mistakes happen.

Optimaite Business solves this not with another checklist, but with real 3-way matching: fully automated, in under one second per document.

What is 3-Way Matching?

3-way matching compares three documents:

Purchase Order (PO) — Your internal document: what did you order, at what price and quantity?
Order Confirmation (AB) — The supplier's response: did they accept the order on the same terms?
Incoming Invoice — What is actually being invoiced?

If all three match, the invoice can be approved and posted immediately. If a line item deviates, a human must decide. This sounds simple — but in practice, POs arrive as SAP exports, order confirmations come by email as PDFs, and invoices come in five different formats. Manual work was previously unavoidable.

How Optimaite Automates the Process

Step 1: Document Ingestion and Extraction

Optimaite receives documents from any source: email inbox, SFTP drop, SAP output, EDI channel or manual upload. The AI model automatically identifies the document type (PO, order confirmation, invoice, delivery note, credit memo) — regardless of format, language or layout.

Structured fields are extracted from each document:

Supplier number and name
Order number / PO reference
Line items: article number, description, quantity, unit price, total amount
Delivery and payment terms
VAT details and total amount

Extraction accuracy reaches 99.7% — even with poorly scanned PDFs or unstructured email attachments.

Step 2: Automated Matching

Once all three documents are available, Optimaite performs the match at the line-item level with configurable tolerance rules:

Price deviation up to ±2%: automatically approved
Quantity difference up to ±1 unit: ignored
Deviation above tolerance: enters the clarification workflow

Tolerance rules can be configured individually per supplier, product category or cost center. Fuzzy matching handles description variants — "Dell Laptop Latitude" and "Dell Latitude Notebook" are recognized as identical.

Step 3: Approval or Clarification

A document that stays within all tolerances is automatically approved. A document with deviations enters the clarification workflow:

Automatic assignment to the responsible buyer
AI provides a structured explanation: "Invoice line 3 deviates by 4.2% from PO price (€18.50 vs €17.75). Supplier announced price increase from 01.02.2026."
Escalation after configurable time limit
Comment function and complete audit log

Step 4: SAP Back-Write

Approved documents are posted directly to SAP — without manual intervention:

Goods receipt posting (movement type 101)
Invoice verification (transaction MIRO)
Accounts payable: journal entry, cost center, profit center

Alternatively: DATEV interface, REST API or webhook for other ERP systems. Every posting is documented in the audit log.

GoBD-Compliant Archiving

All documents are archived in a legally compliant, tamper-proof manner. Every process step — AI extraction, automatic matching, manual approval, posting — is logged with timestamp and user. The archive is always export-ready for tax audits.

Real-World Results

Companies using Optimaite Business for document auditing report:

90% less manual processing time for invoice verification
500+ documents per day processed automatically
Error rate below 0.1% after AI validation
Average clarification time under 4 minutes for exceptions

Pricing

Optimaite Business pricing is available on request. All plans include unlimited users. SAP integration available. 14-day free trial.

Automate Document Auditing: AI-Powered 3-Way Match for POs, ABs & Invoices