Resources

Accounts payable resources

Plain-language guides to the mechanics of accounts payable — what the checks actually compare, how software reads an invoice, and how an approval process holds up as the company grows.

Most writing about AP stays at the altitude of dashboards. These accounts payable guides stay at the desk: the invoice that arrived this morning as a PDF attachment, the purchase order it is supposed to match, the person who has to approve it. Start with the library overview below, or jump straight to a stage.

The library

What these accounts payable guides cover

These accounts payable guides are working explanations, not glossaries. Each one follows a single stage of an invoice's journey — from the PDF that lands in an inbox, through the checks that verify what it claims, to the approval that authorizes payment — and explains what actually happens at that stage: which document answers which question, where the process starts to break as volume grows, and what a well-designed control looks like when it holds.

They are written for the people who do or run this work: AP clerks and reviewers, controllers, and finance leads at growing companies. Most of each guide is deliberately software-agnostic — the mechanics hold whether you run AP on spreadsheets and email or on a dedicated system — and where a guide describes how Onivo AP handles a stage, it says so plainly. Three guides are live today, one per stage. Read them in order for the full journey of an invoice, or jump straight to the stage that hurts.

Each stage below pairs its guide with the matching product page: the guide explains the mechanics on their own terms, and the solution page shows how Onivo AP runs them. Nothing in the guides requires the product to be useful — they are meant to hold up whether or not you ever buy software for this work.

Stage one · Guide

Capture & extraction

How invoice OCR learns your vendors starts from an uncomfortable fact: reading the characters on an invoice is the easy part. On an invoice, meaning lives in the layout — and every vendor designs their own — so a generic parser misreads a vendor the same way on every invoice they send, and data entry quietly turns into monthly data correction.

The guide explains the fix: a correction loop that keeps each reviewer's fix against that vendor's layout, so the mistake corrected in March does not come back in April. It also makes the case that a money field the parser cannot read with confidence should stay blank and stop for a person — a wrong amount looks exactly like a right one, and a blank asks a question a guess never does.

Product side: the invoice capture & OCR page shows the same loop as Onivo runs it.

Stage two · Guide

Matching & controls

A purchase order records what you agreed to buy, a goods receipt what actually arrived, and an invoice what the vendor wants to be paid. What three-way matching checks walks the comparison line by line — does the line exist on the purchase order, is the unit price the one agreed, was the billed quantity received — and through the three mismatch families a failed line lands in: price, quantity, or a line with no counterpart at all.

It also covers the two escape valves that keep the control honest: tolerances, the written bands inside which a small difference is accepted and recorded instead of flagged; and 2-way matching against the purchase order alone — the correct choice for services and subscriptions, where nothing arrives at a dock to count.

Product side: the 3-way invoice matching page covers the checks and tolerances as Onivo runs them.

Stage three · Guide

Approvals & workflow

AP approval workflows that scale looks at why an approval process that works at fifty invoices a month can fail quietly at five hundred, then walks the three ways to route an approval — amount bands, cost centers, and projects — and how they combine: amount decides how many approvals an invoice needs, cost center and project decide whose approvals those are.

From there it treats separation of duties as what it really is — a permissions question, enforced by roles rather than a policy binder — and closes on why the audit trail earns its keep at month-end close, when an approval stops being workflow and becomes evidence: who decided, when, and what they were looking at.

Product side: the approval workflows page shows the routing and audit trail as Onivo runs them.

Evaluating software?

Start here

If you are reading these guides because you are choosing AP software, two pages do the evaluating work. The comparison hub frames the choice by the job you are hiring the software for, with fit guides comparing Onivo to other AP tools — and to running AP in the ledger alone. The pricing page explains how plans are structured: one subscription per company, tiered by monthly invoice volume, every tier fully featured.

Prefer to see the product itself? The ERP integrations page shows how an approved invoice becomes a bill in your system's own terms, and the security overview covers what holds the audit trail together underneath.