What is Three-way match?
Reconciling the purchase order, the delivery note and the invoice. Simple to state, and the single most common place manual document work hides.
The check is that what was ordered, what arrived and what was billed agree on item, quantity and price. The reason it consumes people is that the three documents rarely say the same thing in the same way: descriptions differ, units differ, partial deliveries split a line, and a variation order changes the price after the fact.
Automating it well means extracting from all three, normalising the descriptions and units, and then surfacing only the disagreements - not recomputing the answer. On a delivered accounts-payable system, validation time per invoice fell from 12 minutes to 45 seconds and reconciliation moved from a sample to 100%. Keeping the judgment with the finance team while removing the reading burden is what made full coverage possible at all.
| On this | Three-way match | Rules in the ERP alone |
|---|---|---|
| Where it reads from | The documents as they arrive, including scans and PDFs | Only what has already been keyed into the system |
| Description mismatches | Normalised, so the same item under two names still matches | Fails the match, and a person resolves it |
| What it produces | An exception queue with the reason attached | A blocked invoice with no explanation of why |
- When it is the right answer
- Wherever a person opens two documents beside each other to check whether they agree.
- The service line that delivers this
- AI Document Intelligence
Four thousand supplier invoices a month, and three people typing them into the ERP. Month-end waits for them.
Start here
If a term here is the one your board paper turns on, ask us about it.
We will send the entry, the evidence behind it, and the honest note about where it does not apply.
You get a reply within one working day, from the engineer who would do the work - not a sales sequence.