What is invoice management?

Invoice management is the process of receiving, extracting, and validating invoice information, all the way through to payment. Accounts payable departments can track and pay supplier invoices quickly and smoothly with a proper invoice management solution in place.

What is invoice management software?

Invoice management software is software that allows you to manage the entire invoice management process in one place. You can get full visibility into everything related to an invoice, including the original order, any exceptions that have occurred, receipts, and payments. Configurable dashboards allow you to view the information that’s most important, route approvals and tasks automatically, collaborate with suppliers, and capture early-payment discounts.

Why is invoice management important?

Invoice management is important because it helps procurement, finance, and payables teams speed up and automate the invoicing experience. Having an efficient invoice management process in place can decrease human interventions for accounts payable teams looking to automate reconciliation and approval processes. Accounts payable teams can deliver accelerated cycle time and cost savings through automated exception-handling and capture of negotiated terms. They can also achieve stronger contract, non-PO, or PO compliance and improve conformance with global regulatory requirements.

How do you manage invoices?

You can manage invoices by adopting a digital-first or electronic solution. This is one of the most efficient ways that your accounts payable team can keep track of payments, removing the need for manual, paper-driven processing. Using e-invoicing, you can more accurately and effectively reconcile any invoice exceptions, comply with tax and other global regulatory requirements, and take advantage of early-payment discounts.

What are the steps involved in invoice processing?

The steps involved in invoice processing are: ReceiptProcessPayment Receipt of invoices can involve paper, fax, e-mail, PDF, e-invoice, evaluated receipt settlement, or a PO-flip process. In the processing step, you can define any business rules and validate the information through matching (two-way or three-way) to compare the PO, goods receipt, or contract with what’s on the invoice. In addition, you can route any approvals through the proper workflows and address any alerts or disputes, including invoice exceptions. In the final step of invoice processing, you can make the payment by check, automated clearing house (ACH), wire, card, or other payment networks. This is also where you have the opportunity to take advantage of any supplier discounts, if paying early.

SAP Ariba Invoice Management | E-Invoicing Software

Automating accounts payable to increase efficiency and compliance

Buying and invoicing is increasingly integrated and collaborative. You can keep pace by digitalising and automating invoice management over a global business network. This delivers visibility and efficiency to capture more early-payment discounts and optimise working capital.

The SAP Ariba Invoice Management solution can help you take the complexity out of your invoice-to-pay process and get to ok-to-pay with as little human intervention as possible.

Cloud deployment
Automated invoice reconciliation and approval processes
Network-based business rules to help ensure both contractual and regulatory compliance
Intuitive tools for collaborating on early-payment discounts

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Their analysis evaluates the breadth and depth of our AP automation solutions.

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Key benefits

Automate invoicing and realise new savings

Process more invoices faster and eliminate errors with nearly touch-free invoicing enabled by SAP Business AI and network-based rules.

Solve compliance problems around the globe

Deliver stronger compliance with contracts and purchase orders while meeting global regulatory requirements in virtually every country and currency.

Improve user experiences for maximum impact

Help users make the right decisions with intuitive tools and workflows configured for best practices while enabling effective, digital supplier collaboration.

Key features

Automated reconciliation and approval

Route invoices through your electronic workflows automatically
Eliminate approval delays by accelerating invoice processing with automated escalation and delegation
Manage invoice exceptions through tolerance thresholds based on company policies and process non-PO invoices

Customisable workflows and user configuration

Empower users with intuitive workflows preconfigured for best practices
Modify rules with intuitive drag-and-drop functionality
Add approvers as needed; configure routing to individuals, groups, and work queues; and create work queues by invoice type, supplier group, and spend category

Confidence-boosting compliance tools

Complete transactions in more than 190 countries and more than 70 currencies in compliance with tax legislation and other e-invoicing requirements
Set configurations for up to 40 business rules at a country level and apply them using templates relating to domestic, cross-border, and intra-EU trade

Pricing

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Resources

CFO Insights: Adapting the Role of Finance to Unlock Business Value

See research insights from Oxford Economics to learn why midsize organisations are counting on finance to drive digital transformation and growth.

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Procurement Benchmark Survey Insights

Use this report to facilitate digital transformation, assess outcomes from your source-to-pay solutions, or identify KPIs to improve performance.

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Experience invoice automation in action

Review a modern invoice-to-pay process and see three transformative benefits of electronic invoice management software.

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Portfolio recognition and awards

SAP Ariba solutions are recognised for their multi-faceted industry leadership based on verified user reviews, ratings, and in-depth customer insights.

Technical information

Discover how our cloud solutions fuel your spend strategy with SAP Business Technology Platform and protect your enterprise with built-in security.

Visibility

Unlock spend data with solutions that deliver total spend visibility, aid in planning and forecasting, and connect critical data from SAP and third-party sources.

Extensibility

Customise and extend the value of spend management solutions by eliminating inefficiencies, building new apps, enhancing existing apps, and providing personalised experiences.

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Integration

Centralise data, remove silos, and create a connected enterprise with integration solutions from SAP, streaming your source-to-pay process with pre-built connections.

See what analysts are saying about SAP

Find out why industry analysts have repeatedly named SAP a Leader for our comprehensive procurement solution portfolio.

SAP Named a Leader in Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Source-to-Pay Suites

Find out why SAP has been recognised as a Leader for our ability to execute and completeness of vision in the 2025 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Source-to-Pay Suites.

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Frequently asked questions

: Invoice management is the process of receiving, extracting, and validating invoice information, all the way through to payment. Accounts payable departments can track and pay supplier invoices quickly and smoothly with a proper invoice management solution in place.
: Invoice management software is software that allows you to manage the entire invoice management process in one place. You can get full visibility into everything related to an invoice, including the original order, any exceptions that have occurred, receipts, and payments. Configurable dashboards allow you to view the information that’s most important, route approvals and tasks automatically, collaborate with suppliers, and capture early-payment discounts.
: Invoice management is important because it helps procurement, finance, and payables teams speed up and automate the invoicing experience. Having an efficient invoice management process in place can decrease human interventions for accounts payable teams looking to automate reconciliation and approval processes. Accounts payable teams can deliver accelerated cycle time and cost savings through automated exception-handling and capture of negotiated terms. They can also achieve stronger contract, non-PO, or PO compliance and improve conformance with global regulatory requirements.
: You can manage invoices by adopting a digital-first or electronic solution. This is one of the most efficient ways that your accounts payable team can keep track of payments, removing the need for manual, paper-driven processing. Using e-invoicing, you can more accurately and effectively reconcile any invoice exceptions, comply with tax and other global regulatory requirements, and take advantage of early-payment discounts.
: The steps involved in invoice processing are:

Receipt
Process
Payment

Receipt of invoices can involve paper, fax, e-mail, PDF, e-invoice, evaluated receipt settlement, or a PO-flip process.

In the processing step, you can define any business rules and validate the information through matching (two-way or three-way) to compare the PO, goods receipt, or contract with what’s on the invoice. In addition, you can route any approvals through the proper workflows and address any alerts or disputes, including invoice exceptions.

In the final step of invoice processing, you can make the payment by check, automated clearing house (ACH), wire, card, or other payment networks. This is also where you have the opportunity to take advantage of any supplier discounts, if paying early.

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SAP Ariba Invoice Management