Automate Repetitive Invoice Approvals and Routing

A 25-person accounting team often relies on QuickBooks Online or NetSuite for bookkeeping, combined with a tool like Bill.com for accounts payable. These tools offer basic approval workflows, but they are rigid. For example, you can set a rule that any invoice over $5,000 requires CFO approval. But you cannot create a rule that says 'any invoice over $5,000 from a marketing vendor requires both the CMO and CFO to approve'. This conditional, multi-step logic is where off-the-shelf tools fail.

Consider this common scenario: An AP clerk receives 500 invoices per month via email. For each one, they open the PDF, manually check the PO number against the ERP, verify the line items, and then forward the email to the correct department head. If an invoice for software is over $1,000, it must go to the IT Director. If it is under $1,000, it goes to the department manager. The clerk must remember dozens of these unwritten rules. This process takes 5-7 minutes per invoice and is the primary cause of payment delays and month-end close bottlenecks.

The structural problem is that these AP tools are built for general-purpose OCR and simple rules, not contextual understanding. Their data models are fixed. They cannot see that an invoice from AWS with 'EC2' in the line item description belongs to Engineering while one with 'S3' belongs to Marketing Operations. They treat all invoices from a single vendor the same. This forces your team to become the human routing engine, wasting hundreds of hours a year on low-value work.

The engagement starts with an audit of your existing approval matrix. Syntora maps every rule, dollar threshold, and exception you currently manage manually. We review 50-100 of your past invoices to identify all vendors and formats. This audit produces a clear specification for the AI agent's logic, which you approve before any code is written.

The technical approach uses an AI model via the Claude API to parse incoming invoices from a dedicated inbox or shared drive. A Python service built with FastAPI extracts fields like vendor, invoice number, line items, and amount with over 99% accuracy. This data is checked against the approval logic stored in a Supabase PostgreSQL database. The system then routes the request to the correct approver in Slack or Microsoft Teams, who can approve or reject with a single click. The entire workflow runs on AWS Lambda, keeping hosting costs under $50 per month for processing up to 2,000 invoices.

The delivered system includes a simple dashboard for your accounting team to track the real-time status of every invoice. Approved invoices can be automatically synced to your ledger, building on the same double-entry accounting principles we implemented in our own internal systems. You receive the full source code in your GitHub, a runbook for updating approval rules, and direct support from the engineer who built the system.