Automating receipt and invoice retrieval for modern finance teams

If the monthly routine of hunting down supplier receipts and invoices feels like an endless drain on your team's time, there’s a practical alternative. Payhawk's Financial Controller Agent newest capability, Agent Fetch eliminates one of finance's most persistent bottlenecks. It automatically retrieves receipts and invoices trapped in supplier websites, holding up the close every single month. The result is cleaner, ERP-ready data, less repetitive work and shorter month-end cycles, all without adding headcount.

You probably have someone in finance chasing multiple employees for receipts and invoices from cloud websites, and someone else searching a billing section on your supplier’s website for a PDF that should be there. And as your company grows, the frustration, delays, and disruption do too, at scale.

The real cost of manual invoice collection

Did you know that finance teams wait an average of 12.6 days for online receipts and invoices to arrive after the transaction? At the same time, 68% of AP teams still enter invoice data manually into ERPs, producing errors in nearly 40% of all receipts and invoices.

If you’re manually processing receipts and invoices, don’t worry, so are 65% of UK businesses. But at £15 per invoice, manual processing represents an ongoing operating expense. Reducing that to £5 through automation delivers direct savings of approximately £10 per invoice and meaningful FTE equivalents across high-volume operations.

AI agents (like Payhawk’s Agent Fetch) are eliminating manual invoice processing. Automated invoice retrieval goes far beyond basic OCR. What once took a human three minutes per invoice now happens in seconds.

What automated receipt and invoice retrieval actually means

Automated retrieval is about replacing manual workflows with intelligent software that can handle the entire document lifecycle. From finding, capturing, and extracting, to validating and storing receipts and invoices. It streamlines every step for company employees and finance. This frees your team from the 'busy work' so they can focus on what they do best: strategic analysis, risk management, and driving growth.

So, how does it work?

When you make a purchase, all this happens in real-time:

1. The system (or AI agent) collects the relevant document from the source. Rather than waiting for employees to download and upload documents, AI agents retrieve receipts and invoices directly from your supplier’s website.
2. Extracts the key data via OCR and machine learning. Optical Character Recognition (OCR) scans PDFs and pulls out supplier names, amounts, VAT lines, due dates, and invoice numbers. And machine learning improves accuracy over time.
3. Matches it against purchase orders or card transactions. Two and three-way matching cross-checks receipts and invoices against purchase orders and delivery receipts. The system can flag discrepancies before they turn into a payment issue.
4. Syncs it into your accounting or ERP system. Robust platforms like Payhawk integrate natively with your existing finance tech stack, enabling real-time reconciliation rather than at month-end.

Methods for automating invoice collection

Depending on your setup, there are a few different ways to automate invoice collection and retrieval. Next, we break down four approaches modern finance teams are using and what each one is best suited for.

1. AI agents

An AI agent authenticates with a supplier website, finds the billing section, and downloads the relevant invoice. It then codes all the required fields and submits them to your finance system. This automatic process means you don’t need to manually log into the website yourself, and you don’t have to search or download.

And Payhawk’s Financial Controller Agent does all this, even on sites protected by Cloudflare.

2. Email parsing and OCR

Email parsing pulls attachments automatically from an incoming email through specific software. It then uses OCR to scan and extract all relevant information. This is a good option for supplier receipts and invoices sent via email. However, this option doesn’t solve the supplier website problem.

3. API integrations and supplier websites

If a supplier offers direct API access, the integration can pull invoice data programmatically. This can be efficient, but is limited only to suppliers with compatible infrastructure.

4. Mobile scanning and capture

For in-person receipts like client meals or travel, mobile apps (like Payhawk) let employees take a picture of the receipt and OCR then extracts all necessary information.

As a modern finance team, chances are, you’re using a combination of maybe three or four of these methods. But the problem that the AI agent solves (the supplier website) has historically been the hardest to automate…until now.

How Payhawk’s Agent Fetch changes the supplier website problem

In AP automation, supplier websites have long been a blind spot. With every supplier maintaining its own login wall, finance teams had no choice but to retrieve receipts and invoices manually, one website at a time, across SaaS subscriptions, ad platforms, cloud infrastructure, and more. For CFOs focused on control, visibility, and operational efficiency, it was a persistent gap in an otherwise automated process. That gap is now closing.

The latest feature of Payhawk's Financial Controller Agent, Agent Fetch, is verified through Cloudflare’s Verified Bots programme. This means it can authenticate with supplier websites after a one-time employee sign-in through a secure browser session.

After that, the agent handles everything.

And because of its Cloudflare verification, your IT and compliance teams will be very happy to hear that site owners identify it as a legitimate, trusted bot rather than an unauthorised script.

CEO and co-founder of Payhawk, Hristo Borisov, says Agent Fetch is the most-requested feature in Payhawk’s history:

Employees hate having to login to websites, search for receipts and invoices in hidden or remote sections, then download and upload them, which typically takes about 3 minutes per invoice. Payhawk's AI agents solve this by searching the website, downloading receipts and invoices, coding all the required fields and submitting them on the user's behalf.

At roughly three minutes per invoice, and with Payhawk expecting its customers to collect more than 500,000 online receipts and invoices by 2026, that’s saving almost 4 years of manual work across the customer base in just one year.

The feature is currently available for early access for teams with heavy usage of platforms, including:

• Meta
• LinkedIn
• Google Ads
• AWS
• Google Cloud
• Azure

Plus those using transportation companies:

• Bolt
• Uber
• Freenow

What the benefits actually look like in practice

Faster approval cycles. Receipts and invoices will automatically arrive just hours after a transaction rather than days or weeks later.
Higher accuracy. Manual data entry errors account for a significant proportion of invoice issues. Automated extraction almost completely eliminates transcription errors. This reduces duplicate payments, incorrect coding, and rework.
Stronger compliance. With an automated system, you have a consistent and digitally auditable trail for every document. This is essential when managing things like HMRC compliance.
Real-time cash flow visibility. By processing receipts and invoices in real-time (rather than batched at month-end), you gain the most accurate view of your current cash flow. This means you can make more confident spending decisions, forecast, and manage supplier relationships better.
Less friction across the whole team. When automation handles invoice retrieval, finance stops chasing, employees get their time back, and the friction between both teams disappears.
More time for work that matters. Payhawk’s own CFO AI Readiness Report found that half of organisations are experimenting with AI in finance but haven’t embedded it into core workflows. Automated invoice retrieval is one of the most practical and low-friction ways to close that gap. It removes repetitive work from your team’s plate immediately.

How to make the transition in four practical steps

1. Assess your current workflow

Before changing anything, analyse where your receipts and invoices actually come from. How many supplier websites are you logging into manually each month? And how many suppliers send receipts and invoices via email? Auditing your current workflow helps you pinpoint areas where automation will make the most sense.

2. Choose a solution that fits seamlessly with your stack

Find a platform that natively integrates with your current ERP or accounting system. You need a solution that can support your supplier types and can handle the volume you process.

3. Configure and integrate

Set up your integrations and connect your supplier websites via AI agent authentication. Map your coding rules so that receipts and invoices arrive with the correct category.

4. Train your team and refine

If your team doesn’t know how to use the software, it won’t get used. Ensure they know exactly what the new system automates, which tasks they no longer need to manage, and where human approval is still required.

Agents that go where your receipts and invoices live

AI-powered invoice retrieval, like Payhawk’s Agent Fetch, isn’t just about faster OCR, it’s about bringing those documents securely into your finance system without chasing. This vastly decreases processing time, error rates, and the days your finance team spends on tasks that software can handle in seconds.

So, if your team is still manually logging into supplier websites each month, we can help you solve that problem. Join Payhawk’s waitlist to get early access to Agent Fetch.