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Solution · Finance & accountingEvery blocked invoice gets an owner, the evidence and a decision before Thursday's payment run
Three-way match exceptions resolved before the payment run
Robots collect the order, the goods receipt, the delivery note and the contract price for every blocked invoice, classify the difference and hand the decision to the right buyer or branch in Teams.
Executive summary
Stop chasing price and quantity differences by email while supplier payments wait for weeks.
The starting point is the list SAP already produces.
Blocked invoices reach the person who can decide on day one, with the evidence, instead of after a week of email.
SAP S/4HANA (invoice release, order change, goods receipt via BAPI/OData); SharePoint evidence archive; supplier email for credit-note requests
Business problem
Invoice matching
A three-way match protects the company from paying for what it did not order or receive: the invoice must agree with the purchase order and the goods receipt within a tolerance. When it does not, SAP posts the invoice and blocks it for payment. The control works. What follows does not: SAP records a one-letter block reason and nothing about whose decision it is.
Resolving a block is an investigation, and the evidence sits in five places: the order in SAP, the goods receipt or its absence, the delivery note behind the receiving desk, the buyer's contract, and the invoice itself. An AP clerk cannot judge a price, a buyer will not look for a delivery note, a branch manager has never heard of MRBR. So the case moves by email, and every "please check" restarts the clock.
The CFO sees payables that cannot be forecast, the procurement director sees buyers spending afternoons on invoices, branch managers see deliveries stopped by suppliers on credit hold. And the AP team, which owns none of the decisions, owns the whole backlog.
How it works today
- SystemSAP posts the invoice against the order and blocks it for payment: price or quantity differs from the order or the receipt beyond tolerance
- PersonTwice a week the AP clerk exports the MRBR list to Excel and emails buyers and branches row by row
- WaitingThe buyer replies after two to four days, often with a question back ("which delivery?"), because the email carried no order history
- PersonThe branch digs through the receiving folder for the delivery note and posts a late goods receipt, or answers that the goods came in a different unit
- WaitingPrice disputes go to the supplier, who promises a credit note; the payment run arrives with the invoice still blocked
- Risk of errorUnder pressure someone releases the invoice without the credit note; the reasoning stays in a mailbox and the difference in a price-variance account
Why the current process costs more than it appears
Time that disappears before anyone measures it.
- The 25 minutes spent on a blocked invoice are spread over three departments, so no budget line shows them; the buyer's half hour and the branch manager's search appear nowhere.
- Cash leaves twice for the same difference: through invoices released "to keep the supplier calm" and through credit notes that arrive after the write-off, or never.
- A supplier on credit hold costs more than the invoice in question; a branch without cement for a week loses sales nobody attributes to the block.
- The list is a working-capital blind spot, and the knowledge of how each supplier prices, packs and invoices sits with two or three people.
Cost of inaction
The blocked list grows with the business. Ten more branches mean more receiving points and more late receipts, and every price change that reaches the invoice before the order produces a new wave of blocks. The hidden costs follow: invoices released without the credit note, suppliers who add the company to their overdue list.
Under Directive 2011/7/EU a supplier may claim statutory interest and a fixed recovery fee on every late payment, and an auditor may ask for the basis of any manual release. A process that lives in mailboxes answers neither quickly.
A plausible organisation with realistic proportions. The figures are there to be recalculated on your data; they are not a client result.
A building-materials distributor with 60 branches, 1,800 employees, SAP S/4HANA and Microsoft 365 E3; central AP, goods received at the branches.
About 7,000 PO invoices a month; roughly 900 end up blocked: a third for missing goods receipts, a third for price differences, the rest for unit mismatches and partial deliveries.
MRBR exported to Excel twice a week; the AP team emails buyers and branch managers and releases by hand once someone confirms. Around 25 minutes of combined effort per blocked invoice.
The decisions belong to people outside accounts payable who receive the case without the evidence. A typical block stays open three to five weeks.
A robot gathers order, receipts, delivery-note scans, contract prices and unit conversions for every blocked invoice, classifies the difference with agreed rules, releases what it can and sends the rest to the buyer or branch manager as a Teams task with the evidence.
A third to a half of the blocks resolved without a person and the rest with the right person on day one. The split is modelled on typical block reasons rather than measured at a client.
Proposed solution
The starting point is the list SAP already produces. An unattended robot reads the blocked invoices every night, creates one queue item per invoice in UiPath Orchestrator and collects the evidence a clerk would need an hour to find: order history, receipts, delivery notes, the contract price valid on the delivery date and the unit conversion.
A rule table owned by purchasing and finance classifies each difference. Some classes are deterministic: forty pieces at the piece price equal one pallet at the pallet price; a quantity block whose receipt was posted yesterday has lost its reason. These the robot releases, with the reasoning written into the invoice text. The rest go to a named person: the buyer for a price without contract basis, the branch manager for a missing receipt.
The decision arrives in Microsoft Teams as a UiPath Action Center task: the facts, a proposed action and a link to the evidence pack on SharePoint. The buyer accepts the price, requests a credit note or rejects the invoice; the branch manager confirms receipt or reports non-delivery. Each task has a due date, and the robot executes the outcome in SAP: release, order price change, goods receipt, or a credit-note request to the supplier.
The day before each payment run the robot posts a readiness summary in the AP channel. No AI model is involved; every rule can be printed, replayed on last year's blocks and signed off by finance.
UiPath Orchestrator queues and triggers; UiPath unattended Robots; UiPath Action Center App tasks completed in Microsoft Teams; UiPath Integration Service connectors for Microsoft Teams and Microsoft OneDrive & SharePoint; UiPath Insights; SAP payment blocks and MRBR release
The investigation robot, the rule table with test cases, the evidence pack, the Teams tasks, the SAP write-back, the readiness summary, dashboards and runbook
SAP S/4HANA (or SAP ECC) lookups and postings through UiPath SAP activities and the SAP BAPI and SAP OData connectors; supplier price lists from SharePoint
How the automated process works
- AutomationEvery night a robot reads the blocked invoices from SAP and creates one queue item per invoice with its block reason
- SystemFor each item it collects order history, receipts, earlier invoices, delivery-note references, the valid contract price and the unit conversion
- AutomationThe rule table classifies the difference and releases the deterministic classes in SAP, with the reasoning in the invoice text
- PersonThe buyer decides on a price difference in Teams (accept and update the order, request a credit note, reject); the branch manager confirms or denies the delivery
- AutomationThe robot executes the decision in SAP: release, order price change, goods receipt, or a credit-note request; parked invoices keep an owner and a date
- AutomationThe day before the payment run the AP channel receives the readiness summary; Insights shows blocks by class, age and owner
Human-in-the-loop model
Automation handles
- Reading the blocked list and collecting the evidence from SAP, the branch libraries and the price lists
- Classifying every difference with the agreed rule table and releasing the deterministic classes
- Routing the rest to the right buyer or branch manager in Teams, writing decisions back to SAP and re-checking parked invoices
People decide
- Buyers: accept a price difference and update the order, or request a credit note, within delegated limits
- Branch managers: whether the goods were received as invoiced, from the delivery note and the physical check
- Accounts payable and purchasing: duplicates, unclassified cases, manual releases with a documented reason, and the monthly rule review
Before and after
Systems and integrations
Everything below runs on licences and systems you already hold, or would need anyway.
Inputs
- SAP blocked-invoice list (MRBR selection)
- orders, receipts, info records and contracts in SAP
- delivery-note scans and supplier price lists on SharePoint
Automation layer
- UiPath Orchestrator
- UiPath Robots
- UiPath Integration Service
- UiPath Action Center
- UiPath Insights
Target systems
- SAP S/4HANA (invoice release, order change, goods receipt via BAPI/OData)
- SharePoint evidence archive
- supplier email for credit-note requests
Human touchpoints: Action Center tasks in Microsoft Teams for buyers and branch managers; AP channel in Teams (readiness summary, escalations); Insights dashboards for the AP manager
Technologies used
nightly investigation and SAP write-back; one queue item per blocked invoice; retries and audit
Adecision tasks for buyers and branch managers, completed inside Teams, with due dates
Areadiness summary to the AP channel; evidence packs on SharePoint
Aorder, receipt and contract lookups; invoice release, order change, goods receipt
Ablocks by class, age, owner and supplier; share released without a person
AIllustrative economic model
A model, not a promise.
Put your own volume, minutes and rate into the calculator below; the values we start from are illustrative ranges we see in distributors, not a client measurement. The 25 minutes per blocked invoice is the combined time of the AP clerk, the buyer and the branch; €28 is a blended fully loaded hourly cost across those roles. Working-capital and write-off effects are left out; they are usually larger.
Run the numbers on your data
An illustrative estimate from your own inputs. It models released capacity; it is not a promise of savings.
Business benefits
- Blocked invoices reach the person who can decide on day one, with the evidence, instead of after a week of email
- A third to a half of the blocks (modelled) are released without anyone's time, because rules check unit conversions and posted receipts
- The 25 minutes of chasing per blocked invoice shrink to the minutes the decision takes
- Suppliers are paid on time or told precisely what is missing, so credit holds stop interrupting branch deliveries
- Credit notes are requested the day the difference is classified and tracked until they arrive
The management view
- The treasurer knows before each payment run what will go out and what is held, by supplier and by reason
- The procurement director sees which suppliers and branches generate the differences and can fix the source
- Decision discipline becomes measurable: open tasks per buyer and branch, with ages and escalations
- Every release carries its reasoning; the auditor reads the case file instead of asking the clerk
Board-level KPIs
Security and governance
An auditor should be able to reconstruct every decision.
- A dedicated SAP user for the robot, limited to lookups, invoice release, order price change and goods movement; no payment run, no vendor master changes
- Segregation of duties: whoever confirms receipt never accepts the price; automatic releases are limited to classes finance has signed off, with amount ceilings; the rule table is versioned
- Every release, order change and goods receipt carries the case identifier, the rule or person behind it and the timestamp; the Orchestrator audit log completes the trail
- Two places hold the whole exception queue: your Microsoft 365 tenant and UiPath Automation Cloud's EU region; no external model sees a purchase order or an invoice line
Why now
Combined AP, buyer and branch time on blocked invoices runs at the modelled €10,500 a month, before credit holds and write-offs
Directive 2011/7/EU entitles suppliers to statutory interest and a fixed recovery fee on late payments; a blocked invoice waiting for an email is the one that crosses its due date
Action Center tasks now complete inside Microsoft Teams and SAP is reachable through BAPI and OData connectors without screen automation
Relevant executive roles
The payment run becomes predictable, credit notes stop leaking into price variances, and every release has a documented basis for the auditor
Buyers decide on prices with the evidence in front of them, and reports show which suppliers create the differences
Branches stop losing deliveries to credit holds and receive one clear task instead of a thread of emails from finance
Common questions and objections
SAP releases an invoice once the blocking reason disappears, for example when the goods receipt is posted. It does not find out why the receipt is missing, compare the price with the contract or request the credit note.
They do not have to. The task arrives in the Teams client they already use, with the facts and the evidence; the decision is two clicks and, unlike an email, it has a due date and an escalation.
They do not have to. Rules cover the repeatable classes, which in most distributors are the majority: packaging units, tolerances, late receipts, price-list changes. The rest goes to a person as before.
When this is not the right solution
- Below a couple of hundred blocked invoices a month, a weekly MRBR review with purchasing is cheaper
- Goods receipts are not posted at the time of delivery, so receiving discipline and stock reconciliation come first
- Prices are not maintained in SAP as contracts or info records, so a rule has nothing to compare against
A question for the next management meeting
Of the invoices blocked in SAP today, which could a rule release on its own, and how long does each of the others wait for a person who does not know it is waiting?
Implementation approach
The first week looks the same at every client: we look at the data.
We deliver
- Analysis of three months of your blocked invoices: reasons, suppliers, branches and resolution paths
- The rule table agreed with purchasing and finance, with the automatic-release list and its test cases
- The investigation robot, the SAP write-back, the evidence pack and the decision tasks in Teams
- The readiness summary, Insights dashboards and an operating runbook for accounts payable
We need from you
- An MRBR export with three months of history and the matching order and receipt data
- An owner in accounts payable, a lead buyer and one pilot branch manager
- SAP accounts for test and production, the tolerance settings and the buyers' delegation limits
Stages
Discovery
Block reasons, volumes and resolution paths analysed on real history with AP, purchasing and two branches
Design
Rule table, automatic-release list, routing and escalation, SAP write-back scope, security model
Build and validation
Robot, SAP integration, evidence packs and Teams tasks; replay of historical blocks against the rules
Go-live and optimisation
Pilot suppliers first, automatic releases switched on class by class, hypercare, then monthly rule reviews
Departmental. The effort is driven by the number of SAP company codes and purchasing organisations, the completeness of contracts in SAP and whether branch delivery notes are scanned or on paper.
Every blocked invoice starts an email chain between three desks.
Export your MRBR list with block reasons, suppliers and ages, and tell us who resolves each type. We return a classification of your blocks, the share a rule could release and the economics recalculated on your figures.
Bring us your MRBR block listThe neighbouring process usually has the same problem
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