Find the exception before someone approves the invoice.
This checklist helps fractional controllers, AP consultants, procurement operations, and accounts-payable teams normalize one purchase order, its receiving evidence, and one invoice into a reviewable exception set.
Start with four supplied records
| Record | Minimum fields to normalize | Why it matters |
|---|---|---|
| Purchase order | PO ID, vendor ID, currency, line ID, SKU, ordered quantity, unit price, previously invoiced quantity | Defines the authorized commercial baseline supplied to the review. |
| Receiving evidence | Receipt ID, PO line ID, received quantity, rejected quantity | Separates ordered units from supplied evidence of accepted receipt. |
| Invoice | Invoice ID, vendor ID, currency, PO line ID, quantity, unit price, line amount, subtotal, tax, shipping, total | Provides the requested payment facts and arithmetic to compare. |
| Tolerance policy | Allowed quantity overage, price overage, and rounding tolerance | Prevents an implementation from inventing approval thresholds. |
Field-level exception pass
- Confirm vendor and currency agreement.
- Map every invoice line to a purchase-order line.
- Compare newly invoiced quantity with ordered and previously invoiced quantity.
- Compare newly invoiced quantity with accepted receiving evidence.
- Compare invoice unit price with the purchase-order price and supplied tolerance.
- Recompute each line amount, subtotal, and declared total.
- Keep unmatched lines explicit; never silently drop them.
- Bound possible overpayment exposure from the supplied data.
Useful consultant handoff
- A compact exception list with stable reason codes
- A human-readable disposition such as
DO_NOT_AUTO_APPROVE - Request and report commitments for repeatable review
- A clear split between observed supplied facts and unresolved source authenticity
- A report that can support discovery, process design, or exception triage without pretending to be the ERP
Stop at the control boundary
This checklist and the paid report do not extract documents, authenticate a purchase order, receipt, invoice, contract, vendor, tax treatment, or payment obligation. They do not search other invoices, connect to an ERP, approve an invoice, contact a supplier, initiate payment, move funds, or provide legal, tax, accounting, or audit advice.
A page response, crawl, campaign code, created order, or submitted transaction hash is not a sale or revenue. Only an independently finalized external settlement can establish that.
Operational references
Honeywell describes purchase order, goods receipt, and invoice comparison as a payment-control step. SAP Concur separately describes checking ordered and received goods and configurable thresholds.
Run one bounded review
Use the fixed sample to inspect the report shape. If your facts are already normalized, the live product reviews one purchase order, up to 500 supplied receipt documents, and one invoice with up to 200 lines for $99 in Base USDC.