Solutions · Finance operations
Know what your AP agents posted, changed and paid
Invoice, vendor-master and payment agents work across a shared mailbox, an AP tracker and the ERP. ThetaLayer reconstructs every run across all of them, checks each posting, bank change and payment against its mandate, and tells you what each completed invoice cost.
- AP mailbox audit
- AP tracker workbook
- ERP change documents
- Approvals
- Payment runs
The workflow
One invoice, six steps, four systems
An AP agent's work is spread across systems that each see only their own part. ThetaLayer stitches the pieces into one run — and records which system vouches for each step.
- 01AP intake agentSupplier email readRecorded inMailbox audit log
Message opened by the agent's identity. Message ID hashed; body and subject dropped.
- 02AP intake agentLogged in AP trackerRecorded inWorkbook activity log
Row appended by the agent's service principal. Cell values never leave your network.
- 03AP intake agentVendor checkedRecorded inERP vendor master
Lookup against the vendor record. New vendors or changed bank details go to the vendor-master agent.
- 04AP intake agentPosted or parkedRecorded inERP change documents
Up to €10k posted; above it, parked for approval. Linked on hashed vendor + invoice number.
- 05Finance controllerApprovedRecorded inApprovals system
Decision, approver identity and time — often hours or days after the agent's run ended.
- 06Weekly payment runPaidRecorded inERP payment run
Invoice cleared for payment. Late evidence is linked back to the original run automatically.
Every step is linked to the run with an explicit method and confidence. Uncertainty is shown, never hidden.
- Direct reference
- 95%
- Business key
- 85%
- Time window
- 70%
What ThetaLayer shows you
The failures that cost money, found in the evidence
What ThetaLayer surfaced in an AP demo environment: three agents, two agent platforms, one ERP. Every finding comes with the run, the records and the link behind it.
The same invoice, posted twice and paid twice
The agent reported a timeout and retried. The ERP shows the first attempt posted after all — and so did the retry. Both documents went out in the payment run.
Invoices over €10k posted without approval
A new agent version misread “12.450,00” as 12.45 and posted four invoices above the threshold directly, skipping park-and-approve.
Bank details changed without approval — two to the same IBAN
Three vendor bank-account changes had no approval request. Two different vendors were moved to the same new IBAN: the pattern behind invoice-redirection fraud.
Agent credentials used at 02:13 on a Sunday
ERP postings were made interactively with the AP agent's technical user — with no agent run behind them. Someone else used the agent's identity.
€0.70 → €2.40 per completed invoice after a version change
A new agent version added a retry loop on multi-line invoices. Cost per completed invoice more than tripled, and the scorecard showed it in the first week, not at quarter end.
Send standard PO invoices to the cheaper agent
A vendor agent completes standard PO invoices for €0.57 against €1.85 at a similar completion rate — but completes only 64% of multi-line invoices without a takeover. Route by invoice type, not by vendor.
Examples from our demo environment with simulated data. The control plane isn't told where the problems are; it finds them in the evidence.
Scorecard
Catch a cost regression in its first week
Cost per completed invoice is tracked by agent, version and invoice type. When a release changes the economics, the scorecard shows when, by how much and which runs caused it — down to the retried model calls.
- Version-by-version cost per completed invoice
- Per-run and monthly spend caps with burn-down
- Modeled savings always labeled as modeled
Mandate
Test a control against history before anyone enforces it
Write down the rules your AP policy already contains — approval thresholds, bank-detail approvals, spend caps, identity — and ThetaLayer checks every historical run against them. Change a rule and the whole history is re-checked.
- See how many runs a rule would have stopped
- Separate agent, person and credential in every check
- Draft first, enforce later at the tool boundaries you choose
- 100% passAllowed tools9 tools
- 4 failedApproval above> €10,000
- 3 failedBank details need approvalbank_account
- 22 failedSpend cap per run€2.50
- passActs under own identityrequired
Mandates that fit this work
Your AP policy, written as rules an agent can be checked against
Most of these rules already exist in your finance policy. ThetaLayer turns them into versioned mandates and checks every run, past and future, against them.
- Versioned: edit a rule and every historical run is re-checked
- Detection first: breaches become exceptions for a named owner
- Enforcement later, only at the tool boundaries you choose
- Approval above thresholdamount > €10,000 → park + approve
Invoices above the threshold must be parked and approved before they're posted.
- Bank details need approvalvendor.bank_account
No bank-account change without an approved request from the vendor master data steward.
- One posting per invoiceunique(vendor, invoice no.)
Checked on the hashed business key, so duplicates surface before the payment run.
- Allowed toolsmail · sheets · erp · approvals
Only the tools the workflow needs. Anything else is an exception for the owner.
- Spend capsper run · per month
Runaway runs and monthly overruns are flagged, with a burn-down the owner can see.
- Acts under its own identityservice principal required
No delegated clerk credentials, so the ERP can tell agent from human.
Metrics on the scorecard
The numbers behind every AP agent decision
Defined once, versioned, and traceable to the runs and records behind them — comparable across agents, vendors and versions.
- M01Cost per completed invoice
- All agent spend — model tokens, platform credits and allocated platform fees, labeled as allocated — divided by invoices the agent completed.
- M02Straight-through rate
- Share of invoices completed with no human takeover, escalation or failed run.
- M03Takeover rate
- Share of runs a person had to finish, by agent, version and invoice type.
- M04Approval compliance
- Share of invoices above the approval threshold that were parked and approved before posting.
- M05Duplicate-payment exposure
- Value of invoices posted more than once for the same vendor and supplier invoice number, and whether they were paid.
- M06Evidence coverage
- Share of agent-claimed actions confirmed by an independent record in the ERP, workbook, mailbox or approvals log.
Every metric is defined, versioned and traceable to its source records. Allocated platform fees are labeled as allocated.
Who it's for
Built for the people who own AP outcomes and controls
“Is our agent spend producing finished invoices — and are payment controls holding?”
“Which agent should handle which invoices, and where does my team step in?”
“Can we evidence what agents posted, changed and paid, and who approved it?”
“Which finance agents earn their cost, across vendors?”
How a pilot works here
Our flagship pilot
Accounts-payable invoice processing is the workflow we know best. In six weeks we connect read-only to one agent runtime plus your ERP, AP mailbox and approvals, baseline cost per completed invoice, and draft the mandates your AP policy already implies.
- Workflow
- AP invoice processing
- Agent runtime
- One agent runtime or vendor agent platform
- Systems of record
- ERP · AP mailbox · approvals
- Access
- Read-only. No changes to your agents.
- Success criteria
- e.g. a target reduction in cost per completed invoice at equal output, or a defined set of payment-control findings
- Week 0Connect
- Week 2Baseline
- Week 4Mandates
- Week 6Decide
FAQ
Common questions
Which ERPs and agent platforms can ThetaLayer read from?
Do invoice numbers, IBANs or email contents leave our network?
Does ThetaLayer block postings or payments?
How is cost per completed invoice calculated?
Book a Demo
See an AP workflow reconstructed end to end.
Book a 30-minute walkthrough of the invoice demo — duplicate postings, approval bypasses and cost per completed invoice — and scope a six-week pilot on your own AP agents.