As manufacturing and supply chain organizations transition to standardized electronic invoicing, finance teams often discover unexpected data gaps. According to a November 7, 2026 report from ERP News, Axens recently encountered this exact issue when moving to e-invoicing. While integrating supplier data through an approved platform connected to its SAP environment, the company realized that standardized e-invoicing exchanges dropped certain details previously captured using AI and optical character recognition (OCR) on PDF invoices. This omission left accountants to reconstruct the missing information manually.
The disruption occurred within a mature automation workflow that Axens originally deployed in January 2024 to replace paper-based handling. This established system was built to match invoice data against purchase orders and delivery documents automatically. Around the time of France's September 2026 e-invoicing transition, 48 of the company's suppliers had connected through an approved platform, accounting for 13.4% of incoming invoices during that period. While the structured data transition advanced standardized compliance, the loss of granular fields typically found on original vendor PDFs created a new administrative bottleneck.
For procurement and finance leaders preparing for similar transitions, this scenario highlights the need to audit invoice data requirements before fully abandoning legacy document formats. Standardized data schemas might not natively support the specific line-item details required for three-way matching in an ERP system. As a potential workaround, the report notes that Axens is considering having suppliers send the original PDFs as attachments alongside the structured data to ensure completeness.
Planning Your E-Invoicing Data Strategy
To prevent accountants from having to manually reconstruct missing vendor data, implementation teams should assess their current workflows before adopting new electronic data interchanges:
- Identify which specific invoice fields are currently extracted via OCR and confirm if those exact fields exist in the proposed standardized e-invoicing formats.
- Determine how missing or truncated data will impact your automated matching rules for purchase orders and delivery documents.
- Evaluate whether your current ERP workflow can process original document attachments alongside structured data files to bridge temporary information gaps.
Navigating the shift from document-based OCR to structured e-invoicing requires careful mapping of your financial data. Through our ERP/business process automation services, Decision Intelligent works with organizations to evaluate their current invoice workflows, identify potential data gaps, and align new e-invoicing formats with existing procurement rules.
If your finance team is planning a transition to electronic invoicing and needs to ensure seamless data integration without disrupting your established purchase order matching, we can help you evaluate the technical prerequisites. To discuss your specific industry workflow and automation requirements, please contact Decision Intelligent.