Three-way match software that holds payment until the invoice agrees.

Three-way match software compares three documents for the same purchase: the purchase order, the goods receipt and the supplier's invoice. If the invoice price agrees with the PO and its quantity agrees with what was accepted, it can be paid.

Bollard runs the check when the invoice is recorded, line by line. Checking the total alone can hide problems: a price rise on one line can be offset by a short charge on another, and the total still looks right. A line-level check catches each one separately.

Most failures come down to price or quantity. Either the supplier billed above the agreed price, or it billed for more than was delivered and accepted.

These invoice exceptions are common. Ardent Partners' State of ePayables 2025 found that 18.4% of supplier invoices hit an exception and cannot be paid as they arrive. Some are honest mistakes. Others are creeping prices, such as produce invoices drifting above contract in multi-unit dining, which a line-level match catches before payment.

A two-way match checks the invoice against the purchase order only. A three-way match adds the goods receipt, so it also confirms that the goods arrived and were accepted.

Two-way matching catches price errors but cannot tell whether the delivery happened. That gap is how organisations end up paying for goods that never came or were sent back. In Bollard the receipt is always available to the match, because receiving records accepted quantities against the PO at the dock.

Enforcing the match in the database means the system itself refuses payment against an unmatched invoice, whichever screen or user tries it. A warning on screen can be clicked past at month-end. A rule in the database holds when the team is busy.

Exceptions handled by hand are expensive. The same Ardent Partners report puts the average cost of processing one invoice at $9.84, with best-in-class AP teams spending 79% less. Catching mismatches automatically, at the line where they occur, leaves AP with a short list of real problems to resolve with suppliers.

Three-way match is the sixth of seven steps, between receiving and payment, and it is the last check before money leaves.

The steps before are the purchase order and the goods receipt. The PO supplies the agreed price, locked when the order was raised from the winning quote. The receipt supplies the accepted quantity, recorded per line at the dock.

The step after is payment. Only a matched invoice can have a payment raised against it, and the verdict and the payment both go on the append-only audit trail.

You can, with limits. In a spreadsheet the comparison is manual, and in a typical ERP payment is usually blocked once the module is configured. Bollard blocks payment in the database until the invoice matches, from the first live site.

Manual matching means someone lines up the PO, the delivery docket and the invoice by eye, with prices re-typed at each step. It works until volume rises or the person who knows the suppliers is on leave. An ERP can do the check well, but the agreed price often sits in a separate module and setup takes months. Bollard has the first site live in about two weeks.