Financial automation for SMEs

When should financial processes start being automated? Once a business reaches a certain activity volume, manual processes begin to reduce team productivity. Automation also becomes relevant when financial processes are complex and highly specific to the company’s activity. In that case, automation can connect the ERP, accounting software, bank, DMS, or even your email inbox to centralize invoices, reminders, collections, bank reconciliations, and expense claims, while making cash management easier to supervise. The rise of e-invoicing further reinforces this need by making accounting and DMS systems even more central to finance operations.

1. Identify financial processes

We help you, if this has not already been done, to identify precisely your financial processes, the tools in use, the roles, the document types, and the specificities of your business. This first review makes it possible to separate the standard flow, exceptions, and blocking points.

2. Define what should be automated

We analyze together what creates the most value to automate: the information sources to connect, the email inbox, the bank, the ERP, the CRM, the accounting software, the ticketing system if needed, as well as business rules, OCR, and potential artificial intelligence use cases. The goal is to keep humans on useful decisions, not repetitive work.

3. Deploy the automations

We then put the automations in place by connecting them to your systems through APIs, webhooks, or suitable enterprise software. They are hosted on sovereign infrastructure, with data encryption and access control, to reduce risk and keep the setup manageable.

4. Supervise and improve

We support you over time, together with your teams, to identify the issues that arise, the errors that remain, and the useful adjustments that create more value while reducing manual effort and mistakes.

How do you automate invoicing with HubSpot, Pennylane, and Stripe?

The first tools to connect are the ones that let you automate one process end to end. With HubSpot, you can retrieve the customer, the product or service sold, and the amount, then create or update the record in the CRM. Pennylane then generates the invoice and sends it to the customer, Stripe triggers the payment, and the bank automatically confirms that the payment has been received. The invoice is marked paid, the bank transaction is reconciled, and the cash dashboard is updated. Humans step in only when there is an exception.

How do you automate supplier invoice processing with Sage, Pennylane, or Cegid?

Another highly relevant case already delivered by Koragence is automating a purchasing workflow from the supplier inbox. Invoices are retrieved automatically and then read by an OCR system enhanced with artificial intelligence, without data retention or model retraining, to reduce exposure of sensitive information. The supplier, amount, VAT, and due date fields are extracted, then the program verifies the supplier, finds the matching order in the ERP, checks the amount, detects duplicates, and triggers an approval workflow to a manager or CFO. The process is then connected to your accounting software, such as Pennylane, Sage, or Cegid, to prepare payment, verify with the bank that the payment has been executed, perform reconciliation, archive the document in the DMS, and update the cash dashboard.

Business rules

Business rules work particularly well when incoming data is structured and homogeneous. If orders, invoices, or catalogs always follow the same format, the workflow can directly check an amount, find a reference, apply an approval threshold, or match two documents using deterministic rules. The difficulty appears when several suppliers use different formats, labels, and document structures: multiplying document-specific rules then makes the automation harder to maintain and more sensitive to format changes.

Artificial intelligence

Artificial intelligence becomes useful when the documents and information received are heterogeneous: invoices from different suppliers, catalogs, emails, purchase orders, or supporting documents whose structure varies. Services such as Azure AI Document Intelligence, Google Document AI, or API-accessible models can extract and normalize this information before passing it to the workflow. For financial data, its use must be tightly framed: no retraining on company data, no retention when the vendor and offer allow it, limited access, and logged processing. The results can also be associated with a confidence score: sufficiently reliable data continues automatically, while uncertain extraction is sent to human review to avoid a model error triggering an incorrect financial operation.

Invoicing and approvals

Supplier invoices can be retrieved from an inbox, a DMS, an e-invoicing platform, or an ERP, then matched to the supplier and the corresponding purchase order. The workflow checks the required fields, detects duplicates, and applies the planned approval path according to amount, entity, purchase category, or cost center. Once the document is complete and approvals have been obtained, it can be sent automatically to Pennylane, Sage, Cegid, or the accounting ERP, while mismatches remain blocked for human handling.

Receipts and supporting documents

Receipts, expense claims, and reimbursement supporting documents can be collected and automatically attached to the employee, expense, or relevant file. The workflow checks the required information, amounts, VAT, limits, and certain internal policy rules before triggering approval. Every approval, rejection, or modification is timestamped and kept in the audit trail, with the original document and its history, so the proof linked to an expense can be found quickly.

Financial documents

Payment authorizations, statements, invoices, reconciliation documents, and control files can be centralized in a DMS such as SharePoint, Microsoft 365, Google Drive, or a business-specific solution, with metadata that ties them to the right supplier, customer, transaction, or fiscal year. The same documents remain accessible from the financial process without having to search successively through emails, shared folders, ERP exports, and local archives. Access rights can then be differentiated between accounting, leadership, controlling, and operational teams.

Reconciliation and cash

Bank transactions retrieved via bank API, EBICS, or ERP and accounting software connectors can be compared automatically to expected invoices, payments, and journal entries using amount, date, reference, or counterparty. Sufficiently reliable matches are reconciled automatically, while gaps, partial payments, duplicates, or unmatched transactions are isolated for review. Statuses then feed back into the finance tools so it is easier to distinguish expected, invoiced, collected, late, or blocked cash, without manually rebuilding the picture from several exports.