Three documents
The invoice, the purchase order, the goods receipt — compared line against line.
Onivo · Solutions
3-way matching that checks every line before anyone approves it
Onivo compares the invoice, the purchase order, and the goods receipt line by line, within price, quantity, and amount tolerances you set. A clean match moves on. A mismatch becomes an exception and waits for a person. New to the control itself? Start with the plain-language guide to what 3-way matching actually checks.
3-way match
Invoice INV-3121
Lines paired
Each invoice line matched to its purchase order line
Price check
Unit prices within the tolerance set for this account
Quantity check
Line 4 bills 12 units, the receipt shows 10 — exception raised
Approval
Held until the exception is resolved
Your tolerances
Price, quantity, and amount thresholds your team sets, not defaults you inherit.
Exceptions, not surprises
A failed check holds the invoice from approval until someone resolves it.
2-way when it fits
Service invoices with no receipt match against the purchase order alone.
What gets compared
Three documents, one question: should this invoice be paid?
The invoice
What the vendor says you owe. Onivo reads it straight from the PDF or emailed attachment through invoice capture and OCR — invoice number, dates, totals, and every line item. If a field can't be read with confidence, it stays blank rather than getting a guess.
The purchase order
What you agreed to buy: the items, the quantities, and the unit prices someone signed off on before the order went out. The PO is the money side of the agreement, which is why it anchors both 2-way and 3-way matches.
The goods receipt
What actually arrived — the quantities counted at the dock or confirmed by the person who ordered. The receipt carries no prices; its job in the match is to answer one question: did we get what we're being billed for?
The match runs line by line, not total against total. Each invoice line is paired with its purchase order line, then checked: is the unit price what the PO says, is the quantity billed covered by what was received, does the line amount land inside tolerance. A total-level check would let two offsetting errors cancel out and sail through. Line-level matching doesn't.
Tolerances
Tolerances you set, because the penny question is yours
Real invoices rarely agree with the PO to the cent. A unit price rounds differently, freight gets allocated across lines, a vendor's system truncates where yours rounds. A match that demands exact agreement fails on invoices no one at a desk would question — and then the exception queue becomes the place where every invoice lives. So the thresholds belong to you, not to us:
- Price tolerance — how far a billed unit price may drift from the PO price before the line fails.
- Quantity tolerance — how much the billed quantity may exceed what the receipt shows. A vendor billing twelve units when ten arrived gets caught here.
- Amount tolerance — the ceiling on how far a line's total may sit from what the PO and receipt together support.
Inside the tolerances, the line passes and nobody is interrupted. Outside them, the line fails — visibly, with the two numbers that disagree side by side.
Match failures
What a failed match actually does
A line that fails a check becomes an exception, and the invoice is held from approval. It does not enter approval routing by amount, cost center, and project until the exception is resolved — so an approver never signs off on an invoice with an open discrepancy buried in line 4. The hold is the point: the mismatch waits for a person instead of riding through on momentum.
Alongside the match, Onivo catches duplicate and reissued invoices before they are paid twice — the second copy of an invoice is a mismatch of its own kind, and it gets the same treatment: surfaced, held, decided by a person. Every one of those decisions is recorded in a tamper-evident audit trail, so when the auditor asks why an invoice was paid, the answer is a record, not a recollection.
Once the match passes and approvals finish, the invoice syncs to your books through the ERP connection — with query-before-create, so nothing posts twice.
Line-level matching is where AP tools differ most — see how Onivo compares to other AP tools and to running AP in your accounting system alone.
2-way matching
Why a 2-way match is invoice and PO only
Not every purchase produces a goods receipt. The retainer, the software subscription, the monthly service contract — nothing arrives at a dock, so there is nothing to receive. For those, a 2-way match is the honest check: the invoice against the purchase order, same line pairing, same price and amount tolerances.
The reason it's those two documents and not some other pair comes down to where the money lives. The invoice and the purchase order both carry prices; the goods receipt carries quantities. A 2-way match compares the two documents that state amounts — what was billed against what was agreed. The receipt, when it exists, adds the third question a 3-way match answers: whether the thing being billed for ever showed up. Onivo runs both, so the desk that buys servers and the desk that buys consulting hours each get the match that fits.
FAQ
Three-way match automation, answered
What is 3-way matching in accounts payable?
3-way matching compares three documents before an invoice is approved for payment: the invoice (what the vendor billed), the purchase order (what was agreed), and the goods receipt (what arrived). Onivo runs the comparison line by line, within tolerances you set.
What happens when an invoice fails the match?
The failed check becomes an exception and the invoice is held from approval. It does not move into approval routing until someone resolves the exception, and every decision along the way is recorded in a tamper-evident audit trail.
Who sets the matching tolerances?
You do. Price, quantity, and amount tolerances are set by your team, so the match reflects what your controller would actually question at a desk — not a vendor's default.
What if a purchase has no goods receipt?
Then a 2-way match is the right check. Services, subscriptions, and licenses produce no receipt, so Onivo compares the invoice against the purchase order only — same line pairing, same price and amount tolerances.
See the match run on your own paperwork
Bring a purchase order, its receipt, and the invoice that followed. We'll run the match in front of you and show you exactly where each line lands.
Pricing is sized to invoice volume, and the security page covers how your invoice data is protected.