Screenshot of SAP Ariba Invoice Management

SAP Ariba Invoice Management

Electronic invoice management helps eliminate exceptions and enforce compliance to unlock value trapped inside your payables.

Automating accounts payable to increase efficiency and compliance

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

Key benefits

Automate invoicing and realize 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

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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

Customizable 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
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Visit the Knowledge Center

Catch up on the latest research, analysis, and insights in spend management.

Resources

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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.

Reduce approval delays and enhance cash flow

Learn how businesses are processing as many as 70% more invoices per full-time equivalent and capturing more supplier discounts.

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

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

Integration

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

Data security

Help protect confidentiality and data integrity.

Business process security

Support compliance with regularity requirements.

Risk and threat mitigation

Drive continuous improvement across your operations.

Cloud delivery operations

Enable a smooth transformation while meeting security and compliance requirements.

Get started

Jump-start your implementation and drive ROI by collaborating with industry experts, consultants, and support engineers throughout your journey.

Services

Transform your business quickly and effectively by taking advantage of our holistic service and support plans, expert consulting services, custom application development, proven best practices, and deep industry and technical knowledge.

Support

Help keep your SAP solutions running at peak performance with our IT experts and support services, including long-term plans, embedded teams, remote technology support, self-service portal, and innovation strategies.

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:

  1. Receipt
  2. Process
  3. 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.