Yes. Export this month's order, shipment and invoice lines from your ERP, inventory and sales system or invoicing system (Excel or CSV), upload them to an AI assistant such as ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini, and ask it to run a three-way match by order number and part number. You'll get a first list of discrepancies: what doesn't match, by how much, and the likely cause. It can also help with a customer's statement sent as a PDF, or a single transfer covering several invoices.

At month-end, accountants at wholesale and trading companies usually compare the customer's statement with accounts receivable, then go through orders, delivery notes and invoices entry by entry, calling the sales rep when needed: "Did the price change on this one?" It relies on the accountant knowing the customers and the process well, and it's dependable. This article isn't about replacing it. First, prompts you can copy; then what to check, how your exports and Excel can help, and what to do when you want differences to show up the week something ships.

Ask AI directly: 3 prompts to copy

Copy these and swap in your own columns, units and amounts (the ones below are examples).

A three-way match

Attached are this month's order, shipment and invoice lines. All three files have order number, part number, quantity and unit price. Please match them by order number and part number. Add up quantities for split shipments. Where the order says cases and the shipment says pieces, 1 case = 12 pcs. Treat unit prices within NT$0.5 of each other as matching. List every line that doesn't match: order number, part number, what's different (quantity, unit price, amount, missing document) and by how much, with a likely cause (price change, discount, return, unit, split shipment, missing document). Give me the result as a table I can paste back into Excel.

Checking a customer's statement

Attached are the September statement a customer sent us (PDF) and the September receivables for this customer exported from our ERP. Please compare them line by line on shipment date, document number and amount. List the entries that appear on only one side or have different amounts, then compare the two totals.

A single transfer covering several invoices

A customer just paid NT$86,520 with the note "September goods." Below are this customer's unpaid invoices (invoice number, date, amount). Please find the combinations that add up to exactly this amount. If more than one combination works, or one is a few dozen NT dollars off and might be a transfer fee, list them all and don't pick one.

After AI reconciles, check these 3 things

  1. Did it miss anything? Ask it for the line count and total of each file, and compare them with your ERP reports, so you know no rows were skipped or counted twice.
  2. Did it follow your rules? Unit conversions, tolerances, and how freight and bank fees are handled need to be spelled out first. If it missed one, add a sentence and ask it to redo the match.
  3. A person confirms the cause. The causes it lists are educated guesses. Ask the sales rep who agreed a price change or discount, and warehouse staff whether a return actually arrived. Credit notes and corrections are the accountant's call.

These files include customer names and prices. Use your company's enterprise plan, or replace customer names with codes and delete columns you don't need before you upload. For PDF statements, which are hard to edit, use the enterprise plan.

Make it easier: ERP exports, Excel and AI working together

1. Put the order number on every delivery note

Record the order number on each delivery note, ideally down to the order line. Many ERPs and inventory and sales systems can turn an order straight into a delivery note and carry the number over; for delivery notes created separately, make the order number a required field. Whether AI or a system does the matching, it pairs documents by this number.

2. Write your reconciliation rules on one sheet

Unit conversions (for example, 1 case = 12 pcs), how much unit prices can differ, how freight and transfer fees are handled, which customers tend to pay several invoices at once: put these on a Rules sheet. Attach it every time you ask AI to reconcile, and it will follow the same rules. Your senior accountant's know-how gets written down along the way.

3. Log price changes, discounts and returns the day they happen

Set up a shared change log (a Google Form or a shared spreadsheet both work). When a sales rep agrees a price change or discount, or warehouse staff receive a return, they log the order number, item, and quantity or new price that day. Attach the log when you reconcile, so AI can tie each discrepancy to its cause. At month-end, ask it to count discrepancies by cause, and you'll see which part of the process to adjust first.

When to consider the next step

AI plus Excel can serve you for a long time. It's worth looking at the next step when:

  • You export, upload and tidy up the same three files every month.
  • You want differences found the week something ships, not at month-end.
  • You'd like AI to read your ERP and invoicing data directly, without attaching files each time.
  • You need a record of every match and adjustment for when questions come up later.

The next step: daily three-way matching, with AI connected to your ERP

Three-way matching puts the order, the delivery note (or goods received note) and the invoice side by side and checks that items, quantities, unit prices and amounts all agree. (In Taiwan, the invoice is the government-format "uniform invoice," now commonly issued electronically through the Ministry of Finance's e-invoice platform.) It's what you asked AI to do above; once it's connected to your systems, the same check runs automatically every day.

Three-way matching: the order, delivery notes and invoice are compared on item, quantity, unit price and amount, and mismatches are flagged
Three-way matching: orders, shipments and invoices are checked against each other. Lines that agree pass automatically; any difference is flagged with its likely cause.
  1. Data comes in on its own: data from your existing systems is read every day, through an API or regular export files, with no tidying up and uploading to AI and no system to replace.
  2. Automatic pairing and checking: delivery notes and invoices are paired with orders by order number, customer, item and date range, then checked for quantity (including unit conversion) and unit price against the order or contract price. Split shipments and consolidated invoices add up correctly.
  3. Only what doesn't match goes to a person: each discrepancy shows what's different, links to the related documents, a likely cause (for example, "the delivery note shows a return, but no credit note was issued against the invoice") and who should follow up (the sales rep, warehouse staff or the accountant). Credit notes and corrections are written only after a person confirms, and every step is logged.
Routing after automatic matching (illustrative): most transactions pass automatically, and the few discrepancies are grouped by cause and sent to the right person
After automatic matching (illustrative): most transactions pass straight through; discrepancies are grouped by cause and routed to the right person.

When customer statements and supplier invoices arrive as PDFs or scans, multimodal AI can turn them into structured data before matching (see reading orders and quotes with AI).

Three steps to get started

  1. Make sure you can get data from all three sides: which systems hold your orders, shipments and invoices, and can you export the data or read it through an API?
  2. Write down the matching rules and tolerances: your Rules sheet is the starting point, and your senior accountants usually know the answers already.
  3. Run both in parallel for a month: run the new process alongside your manual reconciliation. Differences the system catches that people missed show what automation adds; ones people catch that the system misses show where the rules need work. Switch over once the results agree.

The first phase typically goes live in about 4–6 weeks. When differences show up every day, the sales rep still remembers what was agreed with the customer and the warehouse can still find the records for that batch. At month-end, the main job becomes reviewing one report of discrepancies.

To see how your order, warehouse and accounting systems could be connected, start with a free AI Health Check, or look at our systems integration service and custom business systems. You're also welcome to talk to us about your reconciliation process.