RPA for invoice processing, 1,200 vendor bills per month

A listed logistics company processed ~1,200 vendor invoices monthly, PDF, email, portal downloads, into SAP with four FTEs doing line-by-line entry. SOX audit noted insufficient segregation of duties on manual edits and no immutable audit trail for invoice corrections.

Simplileap process mining mapped variants: 14 invoice formats, three approval paths, duplicate vendor IDs in SAP master data, and an average 6.2-day cycle from receipt to posting. Leadership mandated straight-through processing above 75% within two quarters.

Approach: UiPath bots built per stable format with Document Understanding fallback for semi-structured PDFs; exception queue with reason codes; bot pause on amount variance > 2% vs PO; immutable Orchestrator log export for auditors.

Technical implementation: SAP BAPI posting with idempotency keys on invoice hash; GSTIN validation regex for India scanned bills; attended bot windows for vendor portals requiring MFA; segregated service accounts for bot vs human correction roles.

Problems: vendor portal MFA broke unattended bots, scheduled attended windows on business days; GST number OCR errors on low-DPI scans, India-specific validation and human queue; finance resisted bot-only posting until parallel run matched manual entries for 30 days.

Governance: monthly bot accuracy review; SOX control documentation updated with RPA ownership; exception SLA of 4 business hours for finance reviewers.

Outcome: straight-through processing 38% → 81%; FTE redeployed to exception analysis and vendor negotiation; audit finding closed next cycle. Company anonymized, listed logistics, reference available under NDA.