Compliance gets the invoice in. What happens next is up to you.
Five lessons from 300+ joint Medius and Thomson Reuters customers on turning e-invoicing mandates into real Finance value
By Yvonne Jans
Director Global Partners at Medius
In my last posts, I wrote that e-invoicing is both the easiest and the hardest thing on your finance agenda, and that it’s the starting point for transformation, not the destination. Since then, the same question keeps coming up: okay, but what does “starting point” look like in practice?
Recently, I got to answer that live, together with our partners at Thomson Reuters, in a session called E-Invoicing Compliance without the Chaos. Here’s the short version.
Receiving an e-invoice is not the same as paying one
Replacing PDFs with XML doesn’t automate your AP process. It just changes the file format. Ardent Partners’ State of AP 2026 shows 48% of AP teams still struggle with slow approvals, and 48% with high exception rates. Another 22% lack visibility into invoice and payment data. Exceptions create manual work, manual work slows approvals, and slow approvals delay payments.
An electronic invoice can still come from an unapproved supplier. It can arrive twice, once as XML and again as a PDF by email. It can fail to match the PO. That’s why our customers pair e-invoicing with AP automation: supplier validation, duplicate detection, line-level PO matching, automatic coding and approval routing for non-PO invoices, and visibility into where things get stuck.
E-invoicing provides the structured data. AP automation turns it into an efficient, controlled process.
And your team doesn’t have to learn anything new. The supplier sends XML; your team sees a familiar invoice image in the same interface as every other invoice. Behind it, there’s no scanning, no OCR and no re-keying.
Your business benefits? Faster approval cycles, fewer costly exceptions, stronger payment control and more predictable cash-flow management.
Then let AI take it further
Once clean, structured data flows into an automated process, AI has something solid to work with. We see value in three places:
Supplier questions. Finance professionals who handle supplier emails report an average of 28 a day, about six hours a week. An AI agent can answer the “where’s my payment?” questions 24/7 and hand over to a human when needed.
Fraud detection. Electronic doesn’t mean legitimate. AI can flag duplicates, changed bank details, unknown suppliers and unusual amounts before payment, not in an audit afterwards.
Intelligent processing. For non-PO invoices, AI can predict cost center and other coding with more than 95% precision, and a copilot gives approvers what they need to decide faster. That’s how teams move from the 38% market average for touchless processing toward the 96% our top performers achieve.
That’s the difference between an AP team that’s constantly firefighting and one that’s in control.
Your business benefits? Lower processing costs, reduced fraud exposure, a better supplier experience, and more capacity for Finance to focus on strategic work.
Five best practices we keep seeing
- Establish clear ownership. Finance and IT both matter, but one team needs to be accountable. Finance is the natural choice: it owns the process and the outcome.
- Map your mandate exposure. It’s easy to underestimate how many mandates touch your business. Belgium, Poland, France and Germany are already in scope for many multinationals. Plan for what’s coming.
- Choose one compliance partner who keeps up with change. Compliance isn’t a one-off project. Country-by-country integrations mean more work, more cost and more inconsistency every time a rule changes. And you don’t want to end up with a patchwork of different service providers that you have to manage across countries.
- Use structured data as the input for AP automation. That’s where the value is unlocked, where AI can build on it and where the ROI is.
- Measure the outcome. Compliance alone doesn’t transform Finance. The numbers show whether your AP process is actually getting better.
Your business benefits? A scalable compliance model that reduces operating complexity and converts regulatory investment into a measurable Finance ROI.
Four things you can do this month
Map your mandates.
List the countries you operate in and which e-invoicing requirements are live or announced. No clear overview? That’s your most urgent gap.
Name an owner.
If responsibility is split between IT and Finance with no single lead, fix that first.
Measure your AP baseline.
Know your touchless rate, cost per invoice, cycle time and exception rate. If you don’t have them, start that conversation with your AP team.
Question your provider.
Which mandates do they cover in your markets? Do they absorb regulatory updates or pass them to you? Can they take you from compliance to payment, or are you stitching tools together?
Your business benefits? A clearer transformation roadmap, faster time to value and fewer disconnected systems to manage across markets.
The takeaway
Compliance gets the invoice in. AP automation puts the data to work. AI takes the process further. Measurement proves the value.
Mandates will keep coming whether you’re ready or not. The question is whether they land as a fire drill or as the push your AP process needed.
Ready to turn e-invoicing compliance into measurable Finance value?
Watch the webinar on demand here: Compliance without the chaos — e-invoicing across the globe
You can also download the Webinar Report which highlights key pain points and addresses your best options to a chaos-free outcome.
