How Agentic AI Is Revolutionizing eInvoicing for Global Businesses

In a recent discussion about the agentic AI approach to eInvoicing, Fotis Drakos, Senior Product  Manager at Hypatos, pointed out its many advantages. Automated processing speeds up the payment cycle to improve cash flow and guarantees greater accuracy. Not only does eInvoicing enhance regulatory and tax compliance, electronic records provide a clear audit trail for every transaction, making it easier to track the status of invoices and verify payments, reducing the risk of fraud or loss during the process.

According to Fotis, what makes eInvoicing really powerful is that it acts as a hub, connecting all the entities a company deals with as it supplies goods and services.  

However, collecting information from various sources in order to actually define the invoice in the supplier portal is a tedious task that requires time. It also requires expertise and deep understanding from the person doing the job.   

eInvoicing in a Global Economy

Agentic AI not only facilitates the collection process, but it delivers the same knowledge and ability to make decisions that a human operator would. Many businesses and government portals are already adopting eInvoicing to take advantage of all its capabilities. But, the velocity of adoption varies business by business, country by country. What’s missing is a global standard.  

Global Invoicing Standards – A Distant Goal

We're far away from even discussing global eInvoicing for a number of reasons, including different standards in different countries, different exchange networks lacking interoperability, and different pace of adoption. Some countries like Brazil and Mexico are far ahead of the game having implemented eInvoicing years ago to fight fraud and tax evasion, while others are still fully paper-based.  

In many countries, adoption also depends on the level of complexity for tax systems and the level of importance placed on finding appropriate solutions. One of the more advanced countries for B2G eInvoicing is Germany. Government invoicing has been mandatory for a couple of years, and the B2B transactions for VAT compliance are yet to be put in place.  

Hypatos to the rescue

The simplest thing Hypatos can help with is dealing with differences in basic data formats. The Hypatos system can understand and learn the layout, and identify the invoice number, the amount or even the tax code relative to the country the invoice is coming from.  Generative AI and AI agents in particular can be leveraged to correctly identify the type of invoicing format being dealt with.  

Generative AI, powered by large language models, is revolutionizing many different operational processes across industries and platforms.  In the area of finance, where intelligent document processing platforms were used in the past, Hypatos is optimizing the process of accounts payable and more - enhancing the accuracy and efficiency of the processes required by close to 100%.

Between supplier portals (B2B), government portals and tax authorities (B2G), electronic document interchange is a reality today with Hypatos.  Hypatos is ‘eInvoicing ready’ with a very well defined and standardized process of generating, exchanging and processing invoices in electronic formats through a standardized network.  Using Hypatos, finance departments can process invoices, enrich information, generate documents and produce audit trails.  

And finally, because invoices are no longer PDF formats, but XML documents which are very well defined and structured, standardization will significantly reduce the risk of -data inconsistencies or inaccurate data capturing.

When you put AI agents into the mix you deliver better orchestration of the whole process and better control of the results.   With AI agents it’s not just about the outcome but it's also about being able to see the reasoning behind the outcome.

AI orchestrates different tasks that need to be taking place.  

In summary, Hypatos solutions with agentic AI help customers streamline their invoicing by:

• classifying documents by country of origin

• understanding incoming information, properly extracting it and mapping it to a standardized format, seamlessly integrating it downstream  

• finding anomalies and adding vistal missing information using historical data  

• validating tax compliance and other regulatory information in real-time  

The role of humans in the loop  

It’s important to point out that deploying AI Agents for eInvoicing is not aiming to replace humans. It is aiming to remove humans from the in-between menial, tedious tasks that can be fully automated.  There will always be a role for human oversight for final confirmation and validation. The important factor is that the nature of a role will change from being 80% focused on the repetitive task. With an AI agent doing the vast majority of the repetitive stuff, human labor can be used for the rapidly changing and more challenging tasks.  

Counting the Benefits

The benefit of the Hypatos eInvoicing approach is that it automates and smooths out many of the common issues faced today with accounts payable from receiving the invoice through to final posting in your ERP system.  

Eliminating issues such as suppliers not getting paid on time or high numbers of outstanding invoice payments due to missing information will positively impact cash flow and your company’s ability to compete in the market.  And, through early adoption of eInvoicing, your company will be ready when it comes to complying with future initiatives by supplier and government portals to create standardization and a fully electronic way of interfacing to systems.  

Check out our webinar 'The Agentic AI Approach to eInvoicing,' where Fotis, alongside other two experts, discusses the impact of AI Agents on eInvoicing and more.

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