E-invoicing: what can an AI agent do for accounts payable?

It takes what the reform does not standardise: matching the invoice received to the purchase order and the contract, proposing the coding, preparing the reply when something does not add up. Accounting approves every entry; since 1 September 2026 all companies must be able to receive electronic invoices, and small and micro-enterprises have until 1 September 2027 to issue them.

You are reading this on a date when reception is already mandatory. For accounts payable, the change does not show at the issuing end but in the pile of invoices that now arrives in another format, through another channel, and still has to be checked, coded and paid on the right due date. Here is what an agent can prepare from it, and where it stops.

What the reform standardises, and what it leaves

The calendar, as the tax administration’s page gives it, fits in three lines. Since 1 September 2026, all companies, whatever their size, must be able to receive electronic invoices, and large companies and mid-sized companies must issue all their invoices in that format. Small and micro-enterprises have until 1 September 2027 to issue. The transmission of data to the administration follows the same calendar. Dates can change: check them on impots.gouv.fr when you read this, and ask your chartered accountant what applies to your company.

The volume gives the scale: according to Acteurs Publics, the private sector accounts for about 4 billion invoices a year, and around a hundred platforms have been registered by the DGFiP to carry them. For the administration, the stake is also data. Amélie Verdier, director general of public finances, puts it this way: “With this reform, we will have far more data in near real time to understand activity” (original: « Avec cette réforme, nous allons avoir beaucoup plus de données en temps quasi réel pour appréhender l’activité »). She also stresses processing cost: “According to studies, an electronic invoice is between five and ten times cheaper to process than a paper or PDF invoice” (original: « Selon les études, une facture électronique, c’est entre cinq et dix fois moins cher à traiter qu’une facture papier ou pdf », La Gazette France, 9 March 2026). The article does not detail the study; take it as the order of magnitude the DGFiP announces, not as a figure your own team has measured.

What the reform standardises is the document and its path: a format, a platform, the data sent. It does not say whether the invoice matches what you ordered, whether the price is the one in the contract, whether it was already paid under another reference, or on which account and cost centre it should land. That work stays in the department, and it is the part that can be prepared upstream.

Matching the invoice to the order and the contract

Tuesday, 8:40 am. A supplier accounts clerk opens a mailbox where forty-two invoices have arrived since Friday. For each one she looks for the purchase order, opens the framework contract, compares the lines. Forty-five minutes later she has processed six, and they were not the hardest ones. This is where the agent works: it reads the invoice received, finds the order and the contract in the sources the department has opened to it, then compares lines, quantities, unit prices and payment terms.

When everything matches, the invoice reaches the clerk’s Inbox with the matching already done, ready to approve in a few seconds. When something differs, it arrives with the difference underlined: “three pallets invoiced, two delivered”, “discount in article 4 of the contract not applied”. The clerk no longer searches; she looks at what the agent found and says whether it is right. As with all our agents, it reads with the rights of the person it works for, and Scalt’s Finance page describes this role: extract the invoice, match it to the purchase order, surface the gaps in the Inbox.

Proposing the coding

Coding is the most repetitive and most fragile gesture in accounts payable: the right account, the right cost centre, the right analytical section. The agent proposes it from your chart of accounts and the history of invoices from the same supplier, and it writes down the rule it applied. “Same supplier, same type of service, coded to account X on the last eleven invoices” can be reread in two seconds; a code proposed without explanation cannot.

When the history is missing or contradicts itself, for example a new supplier or an unusual service, the agent says so and leaves the box open rather than guessing. Your chart of accounts and your coding rules remain yours; if accounting corrects a proposal, the correction is recorded with the reason.

Gaps and disputes, prepared

A gap is not settled in the accounting tool but through an exchange with the supplier, and that is often what takes the most time: finding the proof, wording the request, following it up. The agent prepares the file for the gap and the draft reply, which accounting rereads before anything is sent.

The agent does not conclude in place of accounting: a presumed duplicate stays a presumption until someone confirms it. It makes the exception readable, with its cause, which changes a lot on closing day.

What accounting approves

Every entry, every reply to a supplier, every payment proposed goes through someone in accounting. Nothing leaves the circuit: the agent does not pay, does not send anything to a supplier on its own and does not change your chart of accounts. What it removes is the searching and comparing; the decision stays where it was, with the name of the person who took it.

Each invoice opens a case in Cases that keeps what was read, matched, proposed, approved or rejected, by whom and when. When your statutory auditor asks why this invoice was coded that way eight months ago, the answer is in the case and not in someone’s memory. Data stays hosted in a cloud in France, and Scalt can be installed on-premise or in the customer’s cloud; personal data, such as supplier contact names, is anonymised before any model call. For the compliance of your entries, your chartered accountant has the final word.

Customer reminders: the same method on the sales side

E-invoicing also concerns what you issue, and cash flow depends on how long it takes to be paid. According to the Banque de France, the average payment delay stood at 13.4 days at the end of 2025. Putting a name on those days takes someone who looks at due dates every week, and that is nobody’s priority on a Thursday at the end of the month.

The reminders agent detects overdue invoices, looks at the customer’s history (an open dispute, a contact who has changed, a promise to pay) and prepares a graduated reminder: a courteous nudge at D+3, a firmer message at D+15, an alert to the manager at D+30. The thresholds are your department’s. Each message is reread before sending, because a reminder sent to a customer in the middle of a dispute costs more than it brings.

Calendar and approved platform: what is left to do

If your company is a small or micro-enterprise, the issuing deadline is 1 September 2027, less than a year away. Four things need settling before then: choosing the approved platform through which your invoices will pass, which is decided with your chartered accountant and according to your invoicing tool; checking that your customer and supplier records carry the identifiers expected, which the reform quickly reveals when they are missing; deciding who in the company receives and approves purchase invoices; and fixing the list of documents matched against each invoice.

An agent does not replace the approved platform: the platform carries and transmits the invoice. The agent works afterwards, on what you receive, with the sources your department opens to it. Our Finance page describes the use cases Scalt covers (supplier invoices, customer reminders, expense reports, monthly closing); to find out how this plugs into your accounting tool and your platform, talk to the team in a demo, with your own invoices.

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