A global AP operation across 88 companies, unified in 4 months

A household name with a genuinely complex back office

Our client is one of the most recognized consumer goods companies in the world, operating across more than 150 countries.

That global footprint is a strength commercially, but it creates real complexity for finance teams, in our client's case, a sprawl of 88 legal entities, each with its own accounting structure, ERP configuration, and interpretation of how things should be coded.

88 companies, 88 different ways of getting things done

Running finance operations across 88 legal entities means at least that many different accounting structures, ERP configurations, and interpretations of how invoices should be coded — and in many cases, local teams who weren't entirely sure how their own approval hierarchies were set up. 

Hypatos already handled the first part of our client's invoice automation — capture, enrichment, and validation. But with roughly 650,000 PO-based invoices flowing through the business each year, the bigger opportunity was further downstream: efficient PO matching that would reduce manual intervention at scale and feed directly into auto-posting. 

A deliberate rollout, orchestrated to last

Carried out in waves with steady bi-monthly batches, the PO agents were deployed within four months. The pace was intentional. Each new market surfaced something different: a document format that didn't match the standard, an approval chain no one had written down, a tax rule that existed only in a local team's institutional memory. Working through them one by one ensured that each go-live was more predictable than the one before. 

Withholding tax compliance — built by Hypatos from scratch — went live in Indonesia as part of the rollout, starting with our client's highest-volume markets.

With the addition of the PO agents, what's live today covers capture, enrichment, validation and end-to-end PO matching across all 88 company codes. Wave-based deployment, bi-monthly batches.

The PO agent rollout is the foundation of a broader automation platform that continues to expand. Two workstreams are already in motion:

Auto-coding (pilot)

GL coding, cost center prediction and first approver routing are currently in pilot, with a global rollout under evaluation.

Withholding tax (roadmap)

In several markets, invoice processing requires three additional steps: determining WHT applicability, calculating the applicable amount, and assigning the correct tax code. Hypatos already supported a go live for Indonesia and is now expanding further with the next wave covering India, Thailand, Colombia and China.

STP as the north star metric & an infrastructure built for scaling

Our client measures success by one number: how many invoices post without anyone touching them. Everything else follows from that. The results since the PO agents went live point in the right direction:

PO line matching accuracy — up roughly 20 to 30 percentage points from baseline.

Meaningfully more vendors are being auto-posted than at any point previously.

Manual intervention on PO invoices has decreased, and with it the errors that manual processing tends to introduce.

For a business where most invoice volume flows through PO-matched auto-posting, getting matching right at scale compounds quickly.

With all 88 company codes live, our client has the foundation for a finance operation that grows without growing the team behind it.