Transforming SAP Accounts Payable with UiPath’s Agentic Automation

For many finance professionals navigating the complexities of SAP, the Accounts Payable (AP) process can feel like a daily tightrope walk. Studies show that around 70% of organizations still wrestle with clunky Procure-to-Pay (P2P) and AP integrations. Imagine the classic SAP scenario: an invoice arrives, but the Goods Receipt (GR) hasn’t been posted, or a price discrepancy is flagged and needs further investigation.

Now, consider these numbers: 40% of businesses are still manually wrestling with invoices, and 23% of those manual entries are riddled with exceptions needing correction. The result? A snail’s pace of nearly 20 days from invoice receipt to payment for many.

However, automation and artificial intelligence (AI) are changing the game for enterprise solutions in the accounts payable space, and companies like UiPath have taken this a step further by introducing agentic automation to break down the barriers that come with manual processes.

From Task Bots to Thinking Agents

In April 2025, UiPath launched its UiPath Platform for Agentic Automation. Daniel Dines, CEO of UiPath, stated, “We’ve built a platform that unifies AI, robotic process automation (RPA), and human decision making so companies can deliver smarter, more resilient workflows without added complexity.”

UiPath Maestro, an agentic orchestration product, is at the platform’s core. Maestro facilitates the common framework for the Agentic Automation platform, enabling enterprises to model and monitor end-to-end processes. Integrated process intelligence provides visibility into operational performance.

The company’s approach to Agentic Automation is based on a key differentiator—Controlled Agency. This approach offers sophisticated agents armed with enterprise-strength capabilities that can seamlessly orchestrate within workflows alongside people and existing rule-based automation. The core idea is to provide agents that balance autonomy with control, ensuring they’re smart, consistently reliable, and delivering operations that are accurate, safe, and fundamentally trustworthy.

UiPath’s strategy involves enhancing its existing installed base of robots, currently operating in over 10,000 companies, by imbuing them with agentic capabilities. The company aims to achieve human-level accuracy for these agents, leveraging existing customer infrastructure.

Dines also highlighted the platform’s interoperability, indicating it can work with various AI models, systems, and agents. This includes UiPath’s partnership with Google Cloud to adopt the emerging A2A (Agent-to-Agent) protocol, and near-term plans to support MCP (Multi-Agent Collaboration Protocol) servers to enable richer agent collaboration.

So, What’s New for SAP AP Professionals

Traditional intelligent document processing (IDP) offers reliability for known document formats and rule-based matching, particularly for low-complexity scenarios. However, maintenance can be demanding, and exceptions are typically managed manually outside the system’s scope. The UiPath Platform for Agentic Automation, aims to improve exception management in AP processes. It expands operational capabilities to address more complex scenarios, such as:

• Dynamic Invoice Matching: Applying sophisticated checks for intricate invoice matching requirements within SAP, potentially cross-referencing line items against SAP master data or validating complex tax calculations.
• Comprehensive Discrepancy Investigation: Agents can conduct more thorough investigations instead of merely flagging errors. For example, if a Goods Receipt (GR) is missing in SAP, an agent could check expected delivery dates, search related communications, or query other systems for shipping information before presenting its findings. This involves accessing and interpreting data from diverse sources, including SAP, vendor portals, and internal databases.

These enhanced capabilities support more robust decision-making and faster issue resolution. The system can provide clear reasoning for identified discrepancies and may autonomously attempt to resolve issues or draft contextual communications for review and action by the AP team.

Easing the SAP Data Squeeze for Finance Teams

For finance departments, particularly those deeply embedded in the SAP ecosystem like ECC or S/4HANA, the implications are profound and include:

• Drastically reduced close times
• Enhanced data integrity
• Crystal-clear audit trails
• Optimized month-end processes
• Scalability without raising the headcount
• Strategic role enhancement for finance professionals

Finally, UiPath’s agentic automation platform seeks to enable more intelligent, resilient, and efficient AP operations within SAP environments.

What This Means for SAPinsiders

Agentic automation extends beyond traditional RPA for complex SAP exceptions. While conventional RPA automates basic tasks in SAP, UiPath’s agentic platform handles more complex, judgment-oriented work in AP exception management. This includes agents performing nuanced investigations within SAP, contextualizing information from various sources, and proposing resolutions for discrepancies that typically require extensive manual intervention.

Orchestration is key for managing end-to-end SAP AP workflows: UiPath Maestro’s function in unifying AI, bots, and human oversight allows for managing and monitoring the complete AP lifecycle. This offers SAP users the potential to treat the entire process—from invoice ingestion and validation against SAP data to payment proposal and issue resolution—as an integrated, intelligent workflow, enhancing visibility and control.

SAP finance professionals’ focus shifts towards strategic analysis. A primary benefit is the potential to elevate the finance team’s role. By automating high-volume and complex transactional work within SAP, finance professionals with SAP expertise can redirect their efforts from routine data processing and problem-solving to higher-value activities such as financial planning, performance analysis, and strategic decision support, leveraging the improved data quality and speed within their SAP systems.