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Process file · Finance
Finance
What’s inside: connections to your systems · step-by-step flow
Where do supplier credit notes wait for their invoice?
The question this file answersHow many supplier credits are sitting unapplied because nobody found the invoice they belong to?
Fits: finance teams processing 500–5,000+ invoices a month.
Typical day
What the desk looks like today
Typical pattern, unmeasured — the finance playbook counts invoices (500–5,000+ a month for a mid-size firm), not credit notes, so we give no figure for them. Credits arrive in the AP mailbox beside invoices. Someone types vendor, amount and a reference into the ERP and hopes it finds the pair.
What changes
What Monday looks like after
Before month-end close, the AP clerk’s list holds the orphans — a credit against an invoice you never received, a partial amount, a returns credit for goods still in stock — and nothing else. The paired credits are posted as drafts, and the close stops waiting for someone to find the pair.
Typical, not a measured client result. Every figure here comes from the playbook source named below.
How this file is built
No published benchmark isolates credit-note processing. The Ardent Partners and IOFM (2023) AP figures are about invoices and remain on the parent file — credits are not invoices, so the number does not move. Not a cash or DPO claim.
What we install
What we put in front of the systems you already run
Your ERP stays — SAP, Oracle, Dynamics or the one that runs AP. This is the same capture build as our supplier-invoice file, with pairing added:
- credit notes are read from the AP mailbox and the supplier portal and told apart from invoices
- vendor, amount, tax and the referenced invoice number are pulled out and matched against open and paid invoices in the ERP
- a credit that pairs with an invoice is written as a draft posting for the usual approval through the ERP’s API or your import, and a credit with no invoice to pair with, or a wrong amount, goes to the AP clerk with the candidates shown.
What stays human — and what this will not do
Unmatched credits. Commercial disputes. Returns that never reached stock. Tax coding arguments.
Not a cash or DPO claim.
What can go wrong — and what we do about it
Suppliers often omit or mistype the invoice reference — those credits are matched on vendor and amount only, and shown to a person rather than posted, which is why the orphan list will not be empty. Tax coding on a credit follows the original invoice; if that was coded wrongly, the credit inherits it and a person must catch both.
What it costs to get there
The path: free 60-second estimate → free 20-minute review → paid audit of this one process (€1.5–3K, typically two weeks) → pilot with your people in the loop (€10–20K, weeks, not quarters). No transformation programme. Prices are public, on the services page →
Scoped in the audit — the playbook has no estimate for this exact desk.
This is about you if…
- Do supplier credit notes land in the invoice mailbox and get typed in by hand?
- Does your ERP hold the original invoice reference, so a credit can be matched?
What does this mean in euros?
That depends on your volumes and wage costs — this page will not invent the number. The free 60-second estimate runs that calculation from your answers, with every multiplier sourced.
Not a named Aperanda client. Process file · Finance.
Short process file. Same build as its parent file; the playbook has no separate volume or benchmark for this desk.
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