Star Match: Going beyond the three-way match

If you’ve ever worked in purchasing, you’re likely familiar with the three-way match, which verifies the price and unit numbers across invoices, receipts, and purchase orders. As businesses become more sophisticated, finance teams can no longer rely on the traditional three-way match to reconcile documents and prevent overpayments. There’s a lot of information beyond price and unit numbers that are crucial to check, including volume discounts, payment terms, delivery times, transport conditions, chain of custody, service-level agreements, and more.

This is where “Star Match” comes in. It matches across all of these categories to ensure you’re paying for the correct services and goods for the prices you negotiated.

Star Match uses artificial intelligence to read and understand the documents in your contract management software or other enterprise systems to validate their accuracy. It ensures that the payment terms are for the correct duration, that volume or loyalty discounts are being appropriately applied, and more. Star Match can:

Verify price

Identify any pricing discrepancies so you pay the price you negotiated in your contract.

Verify payment terms

Make sure invoice adhere to the contract terms (Net 30, Net 60) so you can better manage your cash flow.

Scan service level agreements

Flag invoices with service level issues to ensure you get what you paid for.

Look out for discount terms

Identify invoices with discounts, so your accounts payable team can pay those invoices first and take advantage of the savings.

Check for missing or expired contracts

Identify which suppliers have either missing or expired agreements before you continue to work with them.

Warn you about upcoming auto-renewals

Notify you of any upcoming auto-renewals so that if necessary, written cancellation notices can be sent before you’re locked in for another year.

Look for competitive prices

Gain visibility into potential overcharges or opportunities to get the same goods or services elsewhere for better rates.      

With Star Match, you can maximize your negotiations by verifying that the agreed-upon terms in your contracts are enforced every time an invoice comes in. You’ll never need to manually check a contract’s terms against an invoice. By helping you manage your contracts, you’ll gain unprecedented control over your spending and become more proactive in future pricing and contract discussions. To learn more about how this works, schedule a demo.