New: Accounts payable

Invoices that today sit in a mailbox and get approved informally now have a proper process in vemix. The new Accounts payable module turns each invoice into a case with a status and an owner, from the forwarded email to the posting batch for your tax adviser.

First: we announced something else

The last post said financial planning was next. It still is; it just swapped places. The reason was feedback from our customers’ daily work: incoming invoices were where most things went wrong, and since 1 January 2025 every German B2B company has to be able to receive e-invoices anyway. A PDF in a mailbox doesn’t replace a process, and an XML file nobody can open does even less.

We say this openly because we develop vemix continuously, and the order of things isn’t fixed. What you report back from daily work can shift it. That is intentional.

Forwarding is enough

Every workspace has its own intake address. Whoever receives an invoice forwards it there. Each usable attachment becomes a document, and the person who forwarded it automatically becomes responsible. Alternatively you drag several files into the list or capture a paper invoice by hand. After forwarding, you get a confirmation with the assigned document number or the reason no document could be created. An email without a usable attachment produces an empty document with a note, so it doesn’t go missing unnoticed.

E-invoice first, AI as the fallback

vemix looks for structured data first. An embedded Factur-X XML inside the PDF, or a standalone XRechnung in CII syntax, is parsed to EN 16931: seller, invoice number, due date, the VAT breakdown per rate, IBAN and remittance information. That’s deterministic and needs no AI.

Only when there is no XML does document recognition take over and read the same fields from a PDF, scan or photo. Every document states which route applied. As with travel expenses, extracted values are a suggestion until a person confirms them.

Four roles per document

A document carries four roles: responsible, subject-matter review, approval and payment. They’re pre-filled from the settings and changeable per document. The subject-matter review is optional, commercial approval is mandatory. The four-eyes principle applies to everyone, administrators included.

We deliberately left out an approval matrix, amount tiers and escalation chains. Instead there is a history with a field-level diff for every change, which also records every reassignment of the role chain. Whoever’s turn it is finds the document in their task list, in the daily digest and, if time is getting tight, in a reminder before the due date.

Payment, your way

With an accounting system connected, approval pushes the document to sevDesk or Lexware Office as an open purchase invoice. You trigger the payment there, and reconciliation reports the status back. Without a connection, vemix bundles approved invoices into a payment run and produces a SEPA file (pain.001) for your online banking. Exactly one route is ever visible, because two routes side by side would lead to double payments.

vemix does not execute the payment itself. The document only turns “paid” once execution is confirmed. We have no access to your bank account. If the IBAN differs from the one last paid for the same supplier, vemix flags it clearly. The changed-bank-details scam is too common to wave through in silence.

Purchase invoices and project costs

This is where it shows why the module sits inside vemix: assign a project to an invoice and it appears there as an actual non-staff cost, exactly once, read-only and with its origin visible. Without a link to a planned cost item it lands in the project’s unplanned pool and still counts towards the budget. The other way round, an AI-detected invoice draft in project costs moves into payment approval with one click, and nobody has to confirm the same document data twice.

The purchase invoice remains the leading document; the project shows it as actual costs.

The folder for your tax adviser

At the end of the month or quarter you pick a period. Route A delivers a ZIP with all original documents (plus the XML for e-invoices) and a CSV any accountancy firm can open in Excel. Route B delivers the DATEV posting batch “Aufwand an Kreditor” (expense against vendor account) with an input-tax key per rate and stable vendor account numbers, along with the receipts ZIP for DATEV document transfer. Anything that cannot be posted is named and skipped; vemix never posts to a substitute account. The source document stays immutable from import and is retained for eight years.

Availability and what’s next

The module is available to all new customers, including the free trial. For existing customers we activate it on request. It stands on its own: without the project module only the project fields are missing, and without a connected accounting system the SEPA route remains. Account pre-coding will follow once financial planning is available.

Next up is financial planning: P&L, CAPEX and cash flow based on the project and cost data you already capture. For accounts payable itself, structured early-payment discount terms, a lightweight vendor master and payment initiation straight from vemix are on the list. If anything is still missing from your invoice intake, tell us.