AI for Accounts Payable: Catch Duplicate Invoices Before You Pay

An invoice arrives by email. The supplier sends another copy to your purchaser on WhatsApp. Someone forwards it to accounts with “please arrange payment”. Both copies enter the payment queue.

The problem is not slow typing. It is that nobody has a reliable view of what has arrived, what has been checked and what has already been paid.

For Malaysian SMEs considering AI accounts payable automation, this is the useful starting point: make each invoice traceable from arrival to approval. Faster data entry should follow, not lead.

Automate the checks, not just the keying-in

Consider an illustrative distributor with a warehouse in Klang and branches in Johor and Penang. Purchase orders sit in its accounting system, delivery confirmations come from branch staff, and invoices arrive in a shared mailbox.

An invoice-reading tool would help extract supplier names, invoice numbers and amounts. But extraction alone would not tell accounts whether the goods arrived, whether another branch already submitted the invoice or who should approve it.

A proposed agentic workflow should handle the next steps too:

Register the invoice and retain its original attachment.
Compare it with existing invoices, purchase orders and receiving records.
Request missing evidence from the responsible person.
Route discrepancies to a named reviewer.
Prepare a checked approval pack for finance.

These are requirements to test, not capabilities to assume every AI product includes. Ask a provider to demonstrate the complete journey using your documents, including the awkward ones.

Give every invoice one record

Start by defining where invoices should enter the process. A shared accounts mailbox is easier to control than several personal inboxes. If invoices also arrive through WhatsApp or branch staff, provide an agreed route into the same register.

Keep the supplier’s original invoice number alongside a normalised version for comparison. For example, “INV-00128” and “INV 00128” should trigger a possible-duplicate check, not automatically become separate liabilities.

Design the workflow to compare several fields:

Supplier identity and supplier account code.
Original and normalised invoice numbers.
Invoice date, currency and total.
Purchase order and delivery references.
Existing approval, posting and payment status.

A matching amount alone is not enough. Two monthly rental invoices may legitimately have the same value. Equally, a slightly altered invoice number should not escape review simply because it is not an exact match.

Keep possible duplicates on hold until someone resolves them. Do not silently delete them. Finance needs to see why the system raised the flag and which record, if any, should proceed.

Match what was ordered, received and billed

For purchases of goods, design the check around three records: the purchase order, the receiving record and the supplier invoice.

For example, suppose your Johor branch orders 100 cartons at RM48 each. The branch records receipt of 80 cartons, but the invoice bills RM4,800 for all 100. The workflow should hold the discrepancy and request confirmation, rather than assume the remaining cartons arrived.

Partial deliveries need explicit rules. Decide whether finance can approve the received portion, must wait for full delivery or needs a revised invoice. Agree who can resolve quantity and price differences.

Not every expense has a purchase order. Rent, utilities and professional fees need different evidence, such as an approved contract, billing period or confirmation that work was completed.

Before configuration, document:

Which purchases require a purchase order.
What counts as proof of receipt or completed service.
Which differences require review, and by whom.
How credit notes, deposits and partial deliveries are handled.

Use AI where interpretation is needed, such as reading varied invoice layouts. Use fixed rules for arithmetic, approval limits and mandatory holds. Do not ask a language model to improvise your purchasing policy.

Keep MyInvois validation separate from payment approval

LHDN’s MyInvois documentation lists checks covering document structure, core fields, signatures, taxpayers, references, codes, duplicate documents and currency.

Those checks serve a different purpose from your internal purchasing controls. A validated e-Invoice should not be treated as confirmation that your warehouse received the goods or that a manager authorised the expense.

MyInvois also describes a duplicate-document validator that looks for recently submitted similar or identical documents. That is not a substitute for checking your own invoice register, payment history and copies received through different channels.

Build separate statuses into your workflow: e-Invoice validation status, commercial verification status, approval status and payment status. Avoid one green “complete” label that hides unfinished checks.

A validated e-Invoice is not permission to pay: keep tax-document checks separate from purchasing and payment controls.

Where relevant, retain the MyInvois reference alongside the supplier’s invoice number. Give reviewers access to the underlying evidence rather than only an AI-written summary.

Treat bank-detail changes as a separate exception

An invoice can match a genuine purchase and still contain a fraudulent payment instruction.

OCBC Malaysia warns that business email compromise can involve someone impersonating an executive or business partner through a similar or hacked email address. CIMB identifies unfamiliar bank accounts and unsolicited changes to payment procedures as warning signs.

For this workflow, make new or changed supplier bank details a mandatory hold. Do not let the agent overwrite the approved supplier record using information from an incoming invoice or email.

OCBC advises verifying payment-detail changes by calling a known number. HSBC Amanah similarly recommends a non-email check using existing contact details, not contact information supplied in the request.

Record who performed the verification and what was confirmed. Then require a separate authorised person to approve the supplier-record change.

Keep the initial AI deployment outside banking authorisation. It can prepare a payment proposal, but an authorised person should review and release payments through the bank’s established controls. A reassuring AI explanation is not independent verification.

Pilot against real exceptions, not tidy demonstrations

Choose one branch or supplier group for a controlled pilot. Keep the existing approval process in place while comparing the proposed workflow’s output with finance’s checks.

Include deliberate test cases: an invoice received twice, a partial delivery, a credit note, an unreadable scan, a changed bank account and an invoice already paid. Test what happens when an integration fails halfway through. Retrying a task must not create a second posting.

Before connecting AutoCount, SQL Account or QNE, confirm the access available in your actual installation. Establish whether the workflow will read records, create drafts or post transactions. Do not assume these permissions are interchangeable.

Expect preparation work. Supplier duplicates need cleaning up. Branch staff need a consistent way to confirm receipt. Approval responsibilities need naming. If receiving records do not exist, fix that gap rather than asking AI to guess.

Measure results against your own baseline:

Staff handling time per invoice, including corrections.
Time spent waiting for evidence or approval.
Incorrect duplicate flags and duplicates missed in testing.
Posting errors and unresolved exceptions.
Invoices approaching their due dates without approval.

If invoice volume is low and the process already works, a shared register and clearer responsibilities may be enough. AI is worth considering when reading, matching and following up across systems consume meaningful staff time.

Solver AI’s approach is to validate the workflow, test it in a controlled environment and then roll it out. For accounts payable, the acceptance test should be specific: fewer manual touches, traceable exceptions and no weakening of payment controls.

Explore connected finance workflows

The aim is not to let AI pay suppliers unsupervised. It is to give finance a checked, documented queue so people spend less time finding information and more time resolving genuine exceptions.