For finance teams in manufacturing, distribution and logistics
The work that consumes your finance team lives in the gaps around it: invoices that don’t match, payments that don’t tie out, the spreadsheets that hold month-end together. Opnua is the system of resolution your ERP never had: exception management across invoices, payments and disputes, alongside the ERP you already run.
Rules record. AI resolves. Accountants analyse.
Thirty minutes, your data, no slides. Or see an exception resolved first.
Where month-end leaks
Every document that reaches finance either records cleanly or needs resolving. The proportion that needs resolving is your team’s week. It happens in five places, and it follows the money.
And get keyed into the ledger by hand.
How many documents did someone type into your system last month, and what else could that person have done?
The three-way match clears the clean cases. The rest live in email, phone calls and memory.
Where do your mismatched invoices actually live while they wait, and who knows they’re there?
Payments arrive short or combined. Unallocated cash sits on the account for weeks.
How much cash is sitting unallocated right now, and how long does a remittance that doesn’t tie out take to clear?
Or one spreadsheet. Disputes stall because the paperwork is in three places.
If your credit controller was out for a month, what would happen to your debtor days?
The close lands on the day it lands because of how many bridges there are.
What day does your close land, and which spreadsheet is the reason it isn’t earlier?
Five minutes, your own numbers, nothing leaves your browser unless you send it.
The idea
The ERP accepts a transaction once it fits within the tolerances you have set: an invoice matched to an order and a receipt, a payment matched to the invoices it settles. Everything outside that has to be sorted before the ledger will take it — and again afterwards, when a recorded invoice is disputed. In most mid-market businesses that work has no system. It has a person, an inbox and a spreadsheet.
Deterministic, auditable, and mostly fine. It stays exactly where it is.
Today, in most businesses, this is the system. Opnua replaces it with one: rules, an AI agent, and a log of every step.
How Opnua works · one exception, start to finish
A demonstration of how the product works, not a customer record
A batch of twelve supplier invoices arrives by email. Eleven match their purchase order and goods receipt within tolerance and post. Invoice 4478 is €212.40 short against PO 8819. It does not fit, so nothing posts and it becomes an exception.
The agent reads delivery note 3318 and finds two cartons short-shipped. It checks the PO, emails the supplier for a credit note, and when CN-1194 arrives it recommends: match the invoice with the credit note and post. The evidence it read and the reasoning are attached. Had the supplier not replied, the exception would have stayed open and visible, and been routed to the buyer with everything known so far.
A named person reviews the recommendation and the evidence, and approves. Only now does anything reach the ledger. The log shows every step: which rule cleared what, what the agent read, what it recommended, who said yes and when.
Intake, matching and clearing: the same shape in cash application, where a remittance that does not tie to the bank is worked the same way. See it in Accounts Payable or in AR & Collections.
Two conversations, one problem
Rules handle everything that fits, so the match is deterministic and the audit trail writes itself. The exceptions that used to live in inboxes are investigated, resolved and logged, with your approval on anything the AI recommends. Reconciliation stops depending on memory, control stops depending on one person, and the close stops being a project.
When the resolution work is carried by rules and AI, headcount stops rising with revenue, cash stops sitting uncollected, and the capacity the board keeps asking about comes from the team you already have — skilled people spending their week on analysis rather than chasing.
Alongside your ERP, not instead of it
Opnua sits around the system of record, in the gaps where the work actually is: intake, matching and the exceptions rules can’t clear; cash application, collections and disputes. It reads your ERP, resolves what doesn’t fit, and writes back only what has been approved.
The pilot
We run a pilot on your own invoices, on your ERP as it stands. The measure is simple: what proportion records without a person touching it, and what happens to the ones that don’t. The gap is almost always purchase-order coverage and supplier discipline, not software, and we will show you which suppliers it is.
Your ERP, your inbox and your bank feed, read-only to begin with. Nothing changes in the ledger.
Deterministic matching runs on your real invoices and receipts. You see what fits first time, and what doesn’t.
The agent works the exceptions: reads the correspondence, contacts the counterparty, recommends. You approve.
The proportion that recorded itself, the hours it returned, and which suppliers are the gap. The numbers are yours either way.
No long-term contract. If the honest answer is “don’t automate this yet”, we’ll say so.
Built for trust
The AI never posts to your ledger. Configured rules post eligible transactions; the AI investigates the exception and recommends; anything it proposes is written back only after a named person approves it. Every action is logged, by whoever or whatever took it.
The agent proposes a resolution with its reasoning and evidence. A named person accepts, changes or rejects it.
Rule, agent or person: every action, in order, with what it looked at and why.
If it can be a rule, it is a rule. The AI is confined to the judgment work, and it says so when it isn’t sure.
Three-way matching, proof of delivery, short shipments, rebates and returns: the exceptions manufacturers and distributors actually have.
Questions finance directors ask
AP automation has got good at intake, and structured e-invoicing will do more of it from 2028. Some tools now handle exceptions inside AP too. What still lands on a person is the exception that crosses AP, AR, procurement and the bank: the invoice that arrived perfectly and doesn’t match the order, the payment that doesn’t tie out, the dispute sitting in someone’s inbox. That is where the hours go. Opnua works those, on the ERPs mid-market manufacturers and distributors actually run, and never lets the intelligence near the ledger.
Where your vendor offers an agent, it works on what is already inside the ERP, and for that it will help. The work between systems is different: the supplier’s PDF, the email thread, the remittance that doesn’t match the bank. That needs something that reads all three, works on your ERP as it stands, and answers to your approval. Opnua sits there, alongside whichever ERP you run.
Rules post what fits, deterministically, the way your matching rules do today. Anything the AI agent resolves is recommended first and posted only after a named person approves it. Every action is logged.
SAP Business One, Sage, Exchequer, Microsoft Dynamics, NetSuite and Oracle among others, on-premises or cloud. Opnua reads the ERP and writes back only approved resolutions; the ERP is not replaced or reconfigured.
No. It is about what the people you already have do all day. Most of the finance teams we meet have a vacancy they can’t fill, not a person they want to lose. The businesses that fix this stop the team growing with the invoice count and put the qualified hours on analysis.
The pilot runs on your own data for four weeks with no long-term contract. If it shows the gap is purchase-order discipline rather than software, we tell you that, and you keep the numbers.
From the founder
“Nobody needs artificial intelligence to post a clean invoice. A rule does that, and a rule can be audited. They need it for the four hundred that don’t match. Every finance director I meet is being told to put AI into their systems. My advice is to keep it out of the ledger and put it on the work around the ledger.”Richard Stafford · Founder and Managing Director, Apridata · Read the idea in full
Put a number on it
A capacity question, not a redundancy plan: the gap is the growth your existing team could absorb. Thirty minutes with your data, no slides, and a plain answer on whether a pilot is the right next step.