Exception checks on every bill
Invoice Exception Management Software and Invoice Exception Handling Automation
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AutoPayables checks every vendor bill as it is read and holds the ones that fail: a total outside your PO tolerance, a quantity billed above what was received, a missing PO, a suspected duplicate, or an amount above your approval limit. Each held bill carries the reason it stopped, so your reviewer fixes the problem instead of looking for it. Plans start at $49 a month, and you can try it on your first 20 invoices.
5
Exception checks run on every bill you upload
3
Duplicate sieves, from identical file to same amount and date
5%
Default PO tolerance, adjustable per account
$49
Per month on Growth, every check included
Accounting sync
Exceptions caught at capture, not at month end
Each check runs when the invoice is read and writes its result onto the bill.
PO variance with your tolerance
The bill total is compared with the linked purchase order. Anything outside your percentage is marked with the dollar difference.
Received quantity check
Bill lines are compared with quantities received on the PO, so a partial delivery billed in full is caught before payment.
Duplicate holds
Same file or same vendor and invoice number holds the bill. Same amount and date with no number raises a warning.
Approval threshold
Bills above your limit wait for approval, and every decision is written to the approval log.
Reason recorded on the bill
The result is saved when the check runs, so a later PO edit does not rewrite why the bill stopped.
Block or warn, your choice
Switch blocking on for PO variances when you want hard stops, or keep it as a warning while you tune the tolerance.
How invoice exception handling works in AutoPayables
Four steps from an emailed invoice to a clean pay run.
Forward or upload invoices
Header, lines, PO number, totals and dates are read from each PDF or image.
Checks run automatically
PO match, received quantity, duplicate sieves and approval threshold run on every bill.
Review only what stopped
Held bills show the reason, the PO figures and the matching original if it is a duplicate.
Pay the clean bills
Approved bills go to the ACH file or check run and export to your accounting system.
A hold list versus exception checks on every bill
The usual spreadsheet process on the left, AutoPayables on the right.
Spreadsheet of bills on hold
- Only lists the problems someone noticed
- Duplicates found after the vendor statement arrives
- Reason for the hold lives in someone's head
- Partial deliveries paid in full
- No record of who cleared what
Exception checks in AutoPayables
- Every bill checked against PO, receipts, duplicates and limits
- Duplicates held before approval and payment
- Reason written onto the bill when the check ran
- Billed quantity compared with received quantity
- Dismissals and approvals logged with a timestamp
Who buys invoice exception management software
US teams where one bad payment costs more than a year of software.
Distributors and manufacturers on POs
Partial shipments and freight changes make variance and receiving checks the main reason to automate.
Multi-location operators
The same vendor invoice arriving at two sites is the classic duplicate, and the sieves catch it.
Controllers before an audit
A record of why each bill was held and who cleared it answers the auditor's first questions.
Outsourced accounting firms
Checks run the same way for every client, so exceptions do not depend on which staff member keyed the bill.
What is invoice exception management software?
Invoice exception management software catches the vendor bills that should not flow straight to payment, tells you why each one stopped, and keeps it out of the pay run until someone clears it. The usual triggers are a bill that disagrees with its purchase order, a quantity billed above what was received, a missing PO, a suspected duplicate, and a bill above your approval limit. AutoPayables runs all five checks on every bill it reads.
Most AP teams already know their exceptions. What they lack is a place where those exceptions are caught before the check goes out rather than after a vendor statement shows the problem. If your current process is a shared inbox, a spreadsheet of "bills on hold" and a controller who remembers which vendors overbill, that is the gap this page is about.
How held bills look in AutoPayables. Each one names the check that stopped it.
Which invoice exceptions does AutoPayables catch?
Five exception types are checked automatically, from the moment an invoice is read. Every check writes its result onto the bill itself, so the reason a bill stopped is recorded at the time it was checked, not recalculated later after someone edits the PO.
| Exception | How it is detected | What happens to the bill |
|---|---|---|
| PO amount variance | Bill total compared with the linked purchase order total, inside a tolerance percentage you set (5% out of the box) | Marked as a variance with the dollar difference. You can choose to block approval until it is cleared. |
| Billed more than received | Each bill line compared with the quantity received on the matching PO line (three-way match) | Listed line by line, for example billed 40 against 32 received |
| No purchase order | PO number read from the invoice is normalized ("PO-1042", "po 1042" and "PO1042" are the same) and looked up for that vendor | Shown as unmatched, so non-PO spend is visible instead of silent |
| Suspected duplicate | Three sieves: the identical file, the same vendor plus the same normalized invoice number, or the same vendor, amount and date when a number is missing | The first two hold the bill before approval and payment. The third only warns, because it is the weakest signal. |
| Over the approval limit | Bill total compared with your approval threshold | Waits in pending approval and the decision is written to the approval log |
A reviewer who has looked at a duplicate warning and knows it is fine dismisses it with one click, and the dismissal is recorded with a timestamp. A rejected bill is excluded from later duplicate checks, so correcting a mistake does not flag your own correction.
How do you handle invoice exceptions automatically?
You handle invoice exceptions automatically by running the same checks on every bill at capture time, holding only the bills that fail, and recording the reason on the bill so the reviewer starts with the answer instead of a hunt. Automation should decide what is clean; a person should decide what to do with what is not.
In practice that means every bill that matches its PO, is not a duplicate and falls under the approval limit moves on without anyone opening it, which on most vendor bases is the large majority. The rest land in a short list, each with a label. That is the part a spreadsheet queue cannot do: it only lists what someone already noticed.
What causes most invoice exceptions?
Most invoice exceptions come from three sources: price or freight changes the vendor applied after the PO was issued, partial deliveries billed as if complete, and the same invoice arriving twice through different channels (email and mail, or a resend after a past-due notice). Missing PO numbers on invoices are the fourth common cause and usually point to buyers ordering outside the PO process.
Knowing which cause dominates for your vendors changes the fix. Constant small price variances usually mean the tolerance is too tight or the PO prices are stale. Repeated over-billing against receipts means receiving is not being recorded on time. Frequent duplicates point to vendors resending invoices because payment is late, which is a cycle-time problem as much as a control problem.
How AutoPayables compares with other ways to manage exceptions
The honest comparison depends on how many bills you process and whether you need routing of each exception to a named owner. Here is what each option does, using each vendor's own published description.
| AutoPayables | Nexus AP | QuickBooks Online on its own | Spreadsheet hold list | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| PO variance flagged automatically | Yes, against a tolerance you set | Yes, flags discrepancies during matching | No. Intuit's item receipt help describes linking receipts to bills, with no automatic price or quantity comparison | No, someone has to spot it |
| Received quantity check | Yes, per bill line against PO lines | Part of its matching process | No | No |
| Duplicate detection | Yes, three sieves, two of them blocking | Not detailed on its exception page | No automatic check | No |
| Routing each exception to an owner | No. Exceptions sit on one list with the reason attached | Yes, "intelligent routing to appropriate team members" | No | Manual |
| Published price | Yes, $49 a month for 200 invoices, $149 for unlimited | Not published on the exception page | Included in the subscription | Staff time |
Nexus AP publishes figures such as a "94% auto-resolution rate" and "75% faster resolution time" on its exception page. Those are its own claims and we have not measured them. If you need exception routing with priority scoring across a large AP department, a tool built around that, like Nexus, is the better fit. If you need every bill checked before payment and a clean list of the ones that failed, at a price you can see today, AutoPayables is built for exactly that.
What AutoPayables does not do with exceptions
We would rather you know the limits before you sign up. AutoPayables does not route different exception types to different owners, does not run SLA clocks, reminders or escalation, and uses one approval threshold rather than multi-level approval chains. PO variance is measured on the bill total against the PO total; per-line unit price variance is not scored separately. The received quantity check matches bill lines to PO lines by their description, so very different wording between your PO and the vendor's invoice will not be paired. For a team of one to five people in AP, those limits rarely matter. For a 30 person shared service center they do.
What does invoice exception management software cost?
AutoPayables costs $49 a month on Growth (200 invoices a month) and $149 a month on Scale (unlimited invoices), and every exception check described on this page runs on both. You can try it on your first 20 invoices before you pay. Most enterprise AP suites with exception routing quote privately, so expect a sales call and an annual contract for those.
Related reading
If exceptions on your side mostly come from purchase orders, start with our invoice matching software page, which goes deeper on two-way and three-way matching. For duplicates specifically, see duplicate invoice detection software. For the process side of exception queues and how to cut your exception rate, read our guide to invoice exception handling, and for QuickBooks shops, QuickBooks 3 way match software covers what Intuit's products leave to you.
Frequently asked questions
Invoice exception management is the process of catching vendor invoices that fail a check before payment, such as a price that disagrees with the purchase order, a quantity above what was received, a missing PO, a suspected duplicate or an amount over the approval limit, then recording why and resolving each one before the bill is paid.
An invoice exception is a vendor bill that cannot go straight to payment because it failed a validation check. The common ones are PO price or total variance, billed quantity above received quantity, no PO reference, a suspected duplicate, and a total above the approval threshold. AutoPayables flags all five on every bill.
Run the same checks on every bill at capture time, hold only the bills that fail, and store the reason on the bill so the reviewer starts with the answer. AutoPayables does this with a configurable PO tolerance, a received quantity check, three duplicate sieves and an approval threshold, so clean bills move on untouched.
There is no single standard, but one industry source puts the average exception rate near 18 percent of invoices. A rate that falls month over month matters more than any benchmark. Track it by cause, because price variances, partial deliveries and duplicates each have a different fix.
Yes. In AutoPayables you set a PO match tolerance as a percentage and can switch on blocking, so a bill outside the tolerance cannot be approved until someone reviews it. Blocking is off by default so teams that do not use POs for every vendor are not stopped.
Yes. AutoPayables checks bills before they reach your ledger and exports approved bills as import files for QuickBooks Online, Xero, NetSuite and Sage. QuickBooks itself can link a bill to a PO but does not compare prices or quantities automatically, which is the gap exception checks fill.
AutoPayables is $49 a month for 200 invoices or $149 a month for unlimited invoices, with every exception check included, and your first 20 invoices are a free trial. Larger AP suites with exception routing usually quote privately after a demo.
See which of your bills would have been held
Upload 20 recent invoices on the free trial and watch the exception checks run on your own vendors.