/ solutions / finance / invoice routing
The delegation-of-authority matrix stops being a lookup someone does by hand
Finance owns the rule for who can approve what, and then someone in AP applies it by hand to every invoice: open the attachment, read off the vendor and amount, find the right approver in the matrix, forward it on. We build the system that pulls invoices from the mailbox, extracts what the matrix needs, and routes each one to the person who can actually sign for it.
Finance wrote the approval rule, then made a person apply it to every invoice
The delegation-of-authority matrix is a finance control: who can approve which spend, at what amount, in which category and entity. It usually lives as a PDF or a spreadsheet, and every invoice gets walked through it by hand. Someone opens the attachment, reads off the vendor, the line items, and the amount, works out which cell of the matrix applies, and forwards it to the approver.
That lookup runs on every payment, all day. AP is not paying invoices so much as dispatching them, and the control finance designed only holds as well as the person applying it that afternoon.
We read each invoice and apply the matrix in software
We pull the attachments out of the mailbox and extract the vendor, the line items, and the amount from each one. Those values run against the delegation-of-authority matrix as software, not a PDF someone reads, and the invoice routes straight to the person who can sign for that amount in that category.
Because the matrix is code now, the routing is the same on every invoice, and the record of who approved what, at what amount, and when is captured as the invoice moves. The trail an auditor asks for is a query, not a reconstruction from forwarded email.
AP approves instead of routing
Extraction and routing are the system's work. The approval stays a person's decision, made on the real numbers with the records behind them. Nothing pays itself.
The AP desk stops being the layer that moves invoices from one inbox to the next and goes back to controlling the spend it is there to control.
/ start
Start with the invoices piling up in the mailbox
Show us how an invoice moves through AP today and where the matrix lives, and we scope it, or email hello@mcintoshsystems.com.