New: Accounts payable

A new module is available in vemix as of today: Accounts payable. It turns what today sits in a mailbox and gets approved by shouting across the room into a case with a state and an owner – from the forwarded email to the booking batch for your tax advisor.

First: we announced something else

The last post said financial planning was next. It still is – it just swapped places. The reason was conversations with you: incoming invoices were where most went wrong day to day, and since 1 January 2025 every German B2B company has to be able to receive e-invoices anyway. A PDF in a mailbox isn’t a process, and an XML file nobody can open certainly isn’t.

We say this openly because we develop vemix continuously, and the order of things isn’t set in stone. What you report back from daily work shifts it – and it should.

Forwarding is enough

Every tenant gets its own intake address. Whoever receives an invoice forwards it there; each usable attachment becomes a document, and the forwarder automatically becomes the responsible person. Alternatively you drag several files into the list or capture a paper invoice by hand. Whoever forwards gets 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 rather than quietly disappearing.

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. And as with travel expenses: extracted is a suggestion, not a state – a human confirms it.

Four people, no approval org chart

A document carries four roles: responsible, functional review, approval, payment. They’re pre-filled from the settings and changeable per document. The functional review is optional, commercial approval is mandatory, and the four-eyes principle has no exception at the top – not even for administrators.

What deliberately doesn’t exist: an approval matrix, amount tiers, escalation chains. What does: a history with a field-level diff on every change, which also records every reassignment of the role chain. Whoever is up finds the document in their task list, in the daily digest and – if it’s getting tight – in a reminder before the due date.

Paid 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 – side by side they would invite a double payment.

vemix does not execute the payment itself, and the document only turns “paid” once execution is confirmed. We can’t see your bank and we don’t pretend to. If the IBAN differs from the one last paid for the same supplier, we say so clearly – the changed-bank-details scam is too common to wave through in silence.

Two views on the same document

The reason this module sits inside vemix rather than beside it applies here too: assign a project to an invoice and it appears there as an actual material 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 at the click of a button, without anyone confirming the same document data twice.

The purchase invoice is the commercial truth, project costing is the project actuals view. One document, two views, no double entry.

The folder for your tax advisor

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 can open in Excel. Route B delivers the DATEV booking batch “expense against creditor” with an input-tax key per rate and stable creditor numbers, along with the receipts ZIP for DATEV document transfer. Anything that cannot be posted is named and skipped – never booked 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 tenants, including the free trial. For existing tenants we’ll enable it on request – a short message is enough. It stands on its own: without the project module only the project fields are missing, without the finance module the pre-accounting, and without a connected accounting system the SEPA route remains.

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 creditor master and payment initiation straight from vemix are on the list. We’ll keep you posted right here – and we’ll keep listening.