AP Product Design: Auto-Reconciling POs, Receipts and Invoices and Routing Mismatches
Company: Peakflo
Role: Product Manager
Category: Product Design & Strategy
Difficulty: medium
Interview Round: Other
Design a product that automates three-way matching in the procure-to-pay process. Before a vendor invoice is paid, it should be checked against the purchase order (what was ordered, in what quantity and at what price) and the goods receipt (what actually arrived). Explain how the product handles exceptions, the invoices where the three records disagree, and scope it the way you would in a product spec.
```hint Start with what goes wrong
List the ways the three records can disagree, and who in the customer's company is able to fix each one, before you design the clean path. Much of the effort, and much of the product, sits there.
```
### Clarifying Questions
- Who is the customer: mid-market finance teams that match invoices by hand, or enterprises whose ERP already does basic matching?
- Where do purchase orders and goods receipts live today (an ERP, a procurement tool, spreadsheets), and do receivers record receipts reliably?
- Should matching work line by line or on invoice totals, and which tolerances do customers expect to set themselves?
- Does the product stop at approving the invoice for payment, or does it also execute the payment?
### What a Strong Answer Covers
- The people involved (accounts payable, buyers, receivers, vendors, auditors) and what manual matching costs them today.
- The matching logic: invoice capture, pairing invoice lines with order lines, tolerances, partial deliveries, and when an invoice clears with no human involved.
- An exception taxonomy with owners, resolution actions, automatic rechecks and an audit trail.
- An MVP cut that includes ERP integration, and a reasoned order for later features such as machine-learned suggestions.
- Metrics that balance the automation rate against wrong or duplicate payments, plus risks such as poor receipt data and fraud.
### Follow-up Questions
- At many customers, receivers forget to log goods receipts, so most invoices land in the exception queue. What do you do?
- How would you set default tolerances, and who should be allowed to change them?
- A customer asks for a model that resolves exceptions automatically. Where would you allow it, and where would you keep a person in the loop?
Overview: A product design prompt about automating three-way matching of purchase orders, goods receipts and vendor invoices in procure-to-pay. It tests whether a PM can define matching rules and tolerances, design exception handling with clear owners, scope an MVP and choose metrics that balance automation against payment errors.