Accounting
What is Accounts Payable (AP)?
Accounts payable (AP) is the balance of money a company owes to its vendors and suppliers for goods or services received on credit. It appears as a current liability on the balance sheet.
Explanation
AP is one of the highest-volume, most document-intensive functions in accounting. The AP workflow typically involves receiving invoices (by email, mail, or portal), matching them to purchase orders and receipts, getting approvals, and executing payment. Each invoice requires data entry, validation, and routing — which at scale means significant manual effort. AP automation targets this workflow specifically: AI reads invoices, matches them to POs, flags discrepancies, routes approvals, and posts entries to the ERP automatically. For accounting teams processing hundreds or thousands of invoices per month, AP automation directly reduces headcount requirements and payment cycle times while improving accuracy.
How Rima relates
Rima automates AP document workflows using Blueprints — extracting invoice data, matching to POs, and outputting ERP-ready entries without manual keying.
Explore invoice processing automationRelated Terms
Invoice Processing
The end-to-end workflow of receiving, validating, approving, and recording supplier invoices.
Three-Way Match
The process of matching a supplier invoice against its purchase order and goods receipt before approving payment.
Purchase Order (PO) Matching
The process of matching an invoice against its corresponding purchase order to verify quantities and prices.
Workflow Automation
Using software to automatically execute a sequence of tasks that would otherwise require manual effort.
See it in action
Rima automates the manual document workflows accounting teams spend hours on every week.