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Accounts payable

Process vendor invoices, route exceptions to the right approver, and push coded entries into Concur, Bill.com, or NetSuite. The AP team owns the workflow, no engineering required.

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The prompt

I want to automate accounts payable. Build me a flow that pulls vendor invoices from email and our portal, extracts the line items, validates against POs and receiving records, applies GL coding, routes exceptions to the right approver, and pushes the approved entries into Concur or our AP system.

Just copy and paste the prompt into a new Parabola flow to get started.

What Parabola builds

A workflow with seven steps you can edit:

1. Receive the invoice. Email inbox, vendor portal, scanned upload. Any source feeds in.

2. Extract the line items. Vendor, invoice number, date, line description, quantity, unit price, total.

3. Validate against the PO. Tie each line back to the corresponding PO line. Flag price variance, quantity variance, missing PO.

4. Validate against receiving. Tie the PO line to the receiving record. Flag invoices for goods that have not yet been received.

5. Apply GL coding. Per vendor, per line description, per cost center. Configurable per invoice type.

6. Route exceptions. Anything outside tolerance routes to the right approver. AP, the requisitioner, the cost-center owner.

7. Push to the AP system. Coded entry into Concur, Bill.com, NetSuite, or whichever system holds AP.

Why teams stop doing this manually

AP is the unglamorous job that gates everything. Every invoice has to land in the system before vendors get paid, before period close has a clean cutoff, before spend analysis works. So AP teams grind through it. Open the email, save the PDF, key it into the system, look up the PO, code the GL, route for approval, post.

The volume is the problem. A growing company adds vendors. Each vendor invoices on their own schedule with their own format. The AP team scales linearly with vendor count. New brand, new entity, new region means new headcount.

Automation kills the linear scaling. Extraction and coding happen mechanically. PO and receiving match runs in the flow. Exception routing puts the human attention where it belongs: on invoices that don't match, on price variances that need explanation, on new vendors that need a category.

What ends up at the AP team is a queue of judgement calls, not a queue of typing.

How it works

Step 1. Paste the prompt.

Open Parabola, paste the prompt in section 2, and let it ask follow-up questions about your vendor mix, your PO process, and your AP system's import spec.

Step 2. Connect your data.

Invoice inbox, vendor portal, your ERP for POs and receiving, your AP system, your GL coding rules.

Step 3. Run it on every invoice.

New invoice arrives, the flow extracts and validates. Clean ones push through. Exceptions land in the right approver's queue.

Related prompts

FAQ

Does this work for non-PO spend?

Yes. Non-PO invoices route to a different validation path: vendor master, GL coding, and approver routing without a PO match step.

Can the flow handle multiple AP systems across entities?

Yes. Each entity gets its own AP system output. The same flow handles routing to Concur for the US entity and to Bill.com for the UK entity.

How does it handle approval thresholds?

Approval routing is rules-based. Under threshold X auto-approves. Above goes to the cost-center owner. Above Y also notifies the controller. Configurable per category and entity.

What about vendor master maintenance?

Each new vendor flagged on first invoice. AP confirms the vendor, adds it to the master, and the next invoice from that vendor flows through.

How is this different from Concur or Bill.com on their own?

Concur and Bill.com are great at the approval and payment workflow. The flow handles the extraction, PO/receiving match, and GL coding upstream of those tools, where most of the manual work lives.
Pay vendors on time without scaling AP headcount.
Paste the prompt, point it at your invoice inbox and your AP system, and let the processing run on its own.
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