Drowning in Supplier Invoices? Meet the Payables Agent in Business Central9 min read
Your supplier invoices rarely arrive in a neat, orderly queue.
They land in different inboxes. Some need to be forwarded to finance. Others are missing information or come from suppliers whose details have changed. Your team then has to open each attachment, identify the supplier, enter the invoice details, choose the correct accounts, and check everything before the invoice can move forward.
One invoice may only take a few minutes. Multiply that by dozens or hundreds, and those minutes soon become a significant drain on your finance team, taking them away from more strategic work.
Microsoft’s Payables Agent for Dynamics 365 Business Central is designed to reduce this administrative burden. It uses AI to help process supplier invoices while keeping your people involved wherever a decision, check or approval is needed.
Does Your Accounts Payable Process Feel Harder Than it Should?
If you recognise any of the following challenges, the Payables Agent may be worth exploring:
- Your finance team spends too much time manually entering invoice information.
- Invoices are easily overlooked in busy or shared inboxes.
- Processing slows down when invoice volumes increase.
- Your team has to repeatedly decide how invoice lines should be coded.
- New or unidentified suppliers create delays.
- Experienced finance employees spend their time on administration rather than higher-value work.
- You want to use AI, but you are not prepared to sacrifice control over your financial processes.
It is a little like having a pile of post delivered to your desk every morning. Before you can act on anything, someone must open each envelope, work out who sent it, decide where it belongs and prepare it for the right person. The Payables Agent helps to perform that initial sorting and preparation inside Business Central.
What is the Payables Agent?
The Payables Agent is an AI-powered capability within Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central.
It monitors a designated mailbox for supplier invoices received as PDF attachments. When an invoice arrives, the agent can:
- Import the email and PDF into Business Central.
- Extract information from the invoice.
- Identify the relevant supplier.
- Suggest invoice details.
- Prepare a purchase document draft.
- Highlight fields that need your attention.
- Turn the completed draft into a purchase invoice.
Rather than starting with a blank screen and manually copying information from an invoice, you begin with a draft that has already been prepared for you.
Think of the agent as a digital finance assistant. It can collect the paperwork, read the invoice and prepare the first draft, but you remain responsible for checking the work and making the important decisions.
How Does it Work?
The process begins when you or one of your suppliers sends an invoice to the mailbox monitored by the Payables Agent.
For every PDF attachment, the agent creates an entry in the Inbound E-Documents area of Business Central. It then uses Azure Document Intelligence to extract the information from the invoice.
The agent attempts to identify the correct supplier and uses several sources of information to prepare the invoice details. These can include:
- Information extracted from the PDF.
- Previous invoices from the supplier.
- Text-to-general-ledger-account mappings.
- Item references.
- Relevant data already held in Business Central.
You can then review the suggested information in a purchase document draft. The agent shows you which fields may require attention and explains why it has made particular suggestions.
Once you are satisfied with the draft, you can finalise it. Business Central then creates the purchase invoice and displays it in the Purchase Invoices list.
What Happens When the Agent is not Sure?
Supplier invoices are often unclear or inconsistent. A company may use a different trading name, invoice descriptions can be vague, or the supplier may not exist in Business Central yet.
When the Payables Agent cannot confidently identify the correct supplier or complete part of the invoice, it stops and asks an authorised user, known as an agent supervisor or overseer, for help.
If the supplier is new, you can instruct the agent to create a supplier record using the information extracted from the invoice. The agent fills in as many fields as possible, but it initially blocks the new supplier from further processing.
This safeguard gives you an opportunity to carry out your normal supplier checks before anything progresses. That might include confirming the supplier’s identity, checking bank details and completing any internal approval requirements.
The Payables Agent does not provide supplier approval capabilities. It can prepare the record for you, but it cannot approve the supplier on your behalf.
How Could it Help Your Finance Team?
Reduce Repetitive Data Entry
Manually transferring information from PDFs into Business Central takes time and concentration. It is also not the best use of an experienced finance professional’s skills.
The Payables Agent prepares invoice information for you, so your team can focus on reviewing details rather than entering every field from scratch.
Prevent Invoice Processing From Becoming a Bottleneck
As your business grows, the number of supplier invoices can increase without a matching increase in the size of your finance team.
By helping with the initial processing, the agent may make it easier for your existing team to manage a larger workload. This matters because delays in accounts payable can affect supplier relationships and reduce your visibility of upcoming liabilities.
Make Better use of Your Finance Expertise
Your finance team’s knowledge is valuable. You want that expertise applied to exceptions, controls and business decisions, not consumed by copying invoice numbers, dates and descriptions.
The Payables Agent takes on more of the preparation while your team retains responsibility for reviewing and finalising the work.
Keep the Process Inside Business Central
Invoices, extracted information and draft purchase documents are managed within Business Central. Your team can see the original document, review the information the agent has entered and make changes before finalising the invoice.
This creates a more connected process than moving repeatedly between an email inbox, a PDF, and your finance system.
Introduce AI Without Giving up Control
For many finance leaders, the concern is whether AI can be introduced without weakening oversight.
The Payables Agent is designed to involve you when it needs help. You can review its work, see which fields require attention and examine its reasons for making particular suggestions.
It is closer to giving a capable assistant a carefully defined job than handing your entire accounts payable function to a machine.
Human Oversight Remains Essential
The Payables Agent can operate autonomously in the background, but it is not a completely hands-off solution.
Depending on the invoice and your configuration, you may still need to:
- Review the incoming email and attachment.
- Help the agent identify the correct supplier.
- Check a newly created supplier record.
- Confirm or change suggested invoice details.
- Finalise the purchase document draft.
- Complete your existing approval and posting processes.
The agent works within the permissions and Business Central profile assigned to it by your administrator. This helps you control what it can access and what actions it can perform.
What Should you Consider Before Using It?
The Payables Agent needs more than a switch being turned on. Before introducing it, you should consider the process and controls surrounding it.
Ask yourself:
- Is your supplier data accurate and up to date?
- Who will supervise the agent and review its work?
- How do you currently verify new suppliers and changes to bank details?
- Do you have a suitable Microsoft 365 shared mailbox?
- Are your Business Central roles and permissions properly configured?
- How will the agent fit into your existing invoice approval process?
- Does your invoice volume fall within the current processing limits?
AI can make a good process easier to operate. It cannot compensate for unclear ownership, poor-quality data or missing financial controls.
Important Limitations
Microsoft states that the feature is validated and supported in English only. It may be used in other languages, but its accuracy and overall performance can vary.
The Payables Agent also uses Copilot Credits for AI interactions. This can incur charges based on the complexity of those interactions, so you must configure a consumption-based billing model for your Business Central environment.
Why Your Mailbox Setup Matters
Microsoft recommends using a dedicated Microsoft 365 shared mailbox for the Payables Agent.
You should use the mailbox specifically for supplier invoices and avoid sharing it with another agent, such as the Sales Order Agent. Otherwise, the agents may conflict over which one should process an incoming email.
Microsoft also recommends keeping this mailbox internal rather than publishing it directly to suppliers. Your employees can review invoices before forwarding them to the monitored mailbox. This gives you an initial opportunity to spot suspicious or irrelevant emails and reduces unnecessary information being sent to the agent.
The monitored mailbox should be managed through Business Central. If people routinely access it through Outlook and read, move or delete emails, they could interfere with the agent’s ability to process them.
A Practical Example of AI at Work
The Payables Agent shows how AI is moving beyond generating content and answering questions. Agents can now work inside business applications, complete defined tasks and ask people for guidance when they encounter something uncertain.
For your finance team, this does not mean removing people from the process. It means giving them a capable digital assistant that can complete much of the preparation before asking a human colleague to check the work.
You retain control and your team retains its judgement, but fewer working hours need to disappear into routine invoice administration.
How Cloud9 can Help
Introducing the Payables Agent is an opportunity to look at your wider accounts payable process.
Cloud9 can help you assess whether the Payables Agent is suitable for your organisation and how it could fit into your existing Business Central environment. We can help you consider your supplier data, mailbox structure, user permissions, financial controls and the role your people will play in supervising the agent.
Register here for our webinar on Thursday 22nd October at 11am to learn more about AI agents in Business Central.