Touchless Invoice Processing and How to Get There

Touchless invoice processing means an invoice moves from capture to posting with no manual data entry. The software reads it, matches it to the purchase order and goods receipt, and posts it to the ERP when everything agrees within tolerance. A person only steps in when something does not match, so clean invoices pass through untouched.

KIP.ai by Axrail helps finance teams raise the share of invoices that flow through without manual handling while keeping people in control of the rest. Axrail, an Applied AI expert and AWS Premier Tier Partner, built KIP.ai to extract, match and route invoices so your team focuses on exceptions. This guide covers what touchless processing is, how it works and how to increase your touchless rate.

What is touchless invoice processing?

Touchless invoice processing describes an invoice that needs no manual intervention between arriving and posting. Capture, extraction, matching and posting happen automatically, and the invoice only stops if a check fails. It is sometimes called straight-through processing. The point is not to remove people from accounts payable but to stop spending their time on invoices that are already correct.

The old way vs the new way

Manually, every invoice is handled the same way whether it is perfect or problematic: open it, key it, match it by eye, route it. That is roughly 15 minutes per document regardless of whether anything was actually wrong.

With touchless processing, correct invoices consume almost no human time, and the team’s attention goes to the invoices that genuinely need a decision. KIP.ai targets about 80% less time per document, with 90% extraction accuracy on supported documents.

	Manual processing	Touchless processing with KIP.ai
Clean invoice	Keyed and matched by hand	Flows through automatically
Exception	Found late	Flagged early with a reason
Team time	Spent on every invoice	Spent on exceptions only

How does touchless processing work?

Four stages run automatically. Capture ingests the invoice from email or a shared folder. Extraction reads it into structured fields. Matching compares those fields to the purchase order and the goods receipt within your tolerance. If everything agrees, posting sends the data to your ERP. If anything is outside tolerance or a field is low confidence, the invoice branches to an exception queue instead of posting. See invoice data extraction and 3-way matching for how the first two checks work.

How do you raise your touchless rate?

The touchless rate is the share of invoices that post without manual handling. Three levers raise it: extraction accuracy, so fields are read correctly; clean master data, so supplier and PO references match; and sensible tolerances, so trivial differences do not create needless exceptions. Reviewing why invoices fall out and fixing recurring causes, such as a supplier that always formats a field oddly, steadily increases the rate over time.

What happens to the invoices that are not touchless?

They become exceptions, which is the point of the design. KIP.ai highlights the low-confidence or mismatched fields and routes the invoice to a review queue. Every exception is flagged for your team to review and decide. A maker reviews and a checker approves, so nothing posts automatically unless it passed the checks.

Works with your ERP

KIP.ai sends clean, matched data to your accounting system and works with Xero, QuickBooks and Oracle NetSuite, among other systems. Your ledger, controls and audit trail stay where they are, while the manual capture and matching in front of them become touchless for the invoices that qualify.

See it in action

Try the touchless processing demo→

The live demo runs an invoice workflow with built-in sample documents, so you can watch clean invoices pass through and exceptions get flagged. When you are ready, start a free trial or book a demo with the Axrail team.