Red Pill Realities: Where Exceptions, Coding, and Approvals Break Down
- Datahaven4Dynamics
- Oct 7
- 8 min read
Updated: Oct 20
About the Blog Series:
Microsoft’s blue pill version of the Payables Agent looks convincing. But if you’ve worked with Business Central (and NAV before that) long enough, you know Microsoft works hard to establish a narrative when releasing new software. Sometimes the narrative holds up. Sometimes not so much.
This blog series steps outside the Microsoft narrative for the Payables Agent. Each post uncovers one of the red pill realities that you will discover if you were to use the Payables Agent in the real world.
You will likely grow frustrated with the user interfaces used to handle invoice exceptions
The Payables Agent’s design reflects Microsoft’s broader approach to AI in Business Central, i.e., automation wrapped in human oversight. Although it automates invoice intake and draft creation, most validation, exception handling, and contextual linking still rely on human users navigating two disconnected pages: the Copilot Task List and Inbound E-Documents. Each offers partial functionality, but together they create a fragmented, high-friction user experience.
💡 The practical way to think about the issue
You will have to think of the Payables Agent as a guided manual process rather than an autonomous system. The Copilot Task List emphasizes simplicity but lacks the context and efficiency needed for daily AP work. Inbound E-Documents provides more technical visibility but requires constant navigation and re-entry between pages. There’s no unified workspace that shows extracted data, the PDF image, and supporting context side by side. Users must constantly toggle between views to complete a single invoice review.
⚙️ The technical reason(s) underlying the issue
The Payables Agent’s architecture separates its user interfaces into the Copilot Task List and the Inbound E-Documents List. The Copilot Task List handles initial processing and user instructions but is optimized for single-invoice, sequential actions. The Inbound E-Documents page serves as the underlying data repository and audit trail but lacks batch actions and modern navigation tools.
📉 The impact on AP operations
For AP teams processing hundreds of invoices per week, the result is measurable inefficiency. Repetitive navigation, cryptic system messages, and missing context slow throughput and increase fatigue. Because invoices move sequentially through the pipeline, a single exception can stall progress for all downstream tasks. The lack of filters, prioritization, and workload assignment means users can’t easily identify high-value invoices, aging items, or work already in progress. Collaboration and SLA compliance suffer as a result.
Missing annotations mean missing context
The Payables Agent does not allow users to add notes, highlights, or annotations directly to invoice PDFs. When AP staff or approvers need to explain decisions (e.g., why a variance was accepted or a coding change was made) they must use separate systems like email or Teams. This scatters essential context and makes it difficult to reconstruct the reasoning behind approvals later.
💡 The practical way to think about the issue
Expect to manage comments and explanations outside the system. Because annotations can’t be saved on or alongside the invoice image, context for decisions will fragment across channels. Teams that rely on consistent documentation for audits or process improvement will find this limitation particularly painful.
⚙️ The technical reason(s) underlying the issue
The built-in PDF viewer is static and read-only. It doesn’t support markup layers or text overlays. Business Central’s document records store only the binary file, not user-generated notes or annotations. Adding such functionality would require an architectural extension to the document viewer and metadata model.
📉 The impact on AP operations
Without inline annotations, audit preparation and variance reviews become tedious. Managers and auditors must hunt through emails or chat threads to understand prior decisions. This fragmentation weakens internal controls and reduces the transparency that regulators and auditors expect.
Line coding of non-PO invoices can often waste more time than it saves
AI-suggested line coding looks impressive in a demo but falls short in daily AP operations. The Payables Agent can recommend accounts and dimensions based on historical postings, yet it cannot encode company-specific allocation policies or summary-line conventions. Accuracy depends on the consistency of past behavior, not on defined rules. When vendor layouts, descriptions, or fees change, the model starts guessing. As a result, users spend more time reviewing its guesses than typing the data themselves.
💡 The practical way to think about the issue
You will have to think of AI-suggested coding as a convenience. It can accelerate entry for a handful of predictable vendors but becomes unstable at scale, where invoice formats vary and compliance matters. Each line still requires review and confirmation, and every mistake compounds as “training debt” that takes time to correct through repeated posting. Without the ability to formalize policies or enforce rules, coding consistency depends entirely on user vigilance.
⚙️ The technical reason(s) underlying the issue
The Payables Agent’s learning model is limited to pattern recognition from prior postings. It cannot be customized or extended with hard-coded allocation logic, mapping tables, or validation hooks. If the underlying OCR misses key fields such as totals or tax, users must correct those errors before the model can even apply suggestions. The reasoning behind each suggestion is opaque or generic. The model reinforces whatever it observes, right or wrong, and has no concept of compliance thresholds or required evidence.
📉 The impact on AP operations
In real-world environments, AI-suggested coding adds review time instead of reducing it. Long invoices become tedious to audit, with no tools like “jump to next issue,” summary-line allocation, or hot-spotting by confidence level. When errors slip through, they retrain the model in the wrong direction, creating a cycle of corrections and re-postings. The lack of built-in policy enforcement means approvals and dimension requirements still live outside the system, increasing compliance risk and slowing throughput.
The Payables Agent does not support summary line coding
Many AP departments prefer summary-line coding for non-PO invoices, which involves allocating total amounts across a few accounts, dimensions, or cost centers rather than coding every vendor line. The Payables Agent, however, extracts each visible line from the invoice PDF and creates a separate draft entry for each. There is no way to consolidate or allocate totals automatically, leaving AP staff to clean up dozens of unnecessary lines on every invoice.
💡 The practical way to think about the issue
Expect to handle all non-PO invoices at the line level. The Payables Agent assumes that every line on a vendor’s invoice is meaningful and should be posted individually. For AP teams accustomed to coding invoices at a summary level, such as splitting utilities across departments or distributing overhead by percentage, this design forces extra manual steps to merge or delete unwanted lines after the draft is created.
⚙️ The technical reason(s) underlying the issue
The Payables Agent’s extraction process is governed by Azure Document Intelligence, which treats each detected row in a table as a discrete transaction line. Business Central receives this output as structured data and has no built-in mechanism to roll up, group, or consolidate those lines automatically. The AI model can suggest account or dimension coding for each line but cannot apply allocation logic across totals. Learning occurs only at the individual line level and depends entirely on historical postings.
📉 The impact on AP operations
Without summary-line support, AP teams lose one of their simplest efficiency tools. Each invoice requires redundant review and editing, particularly for vendors with long itemized statements. This adds workload, slows processing time, and increases the chance of posting errors. The model’s gradual learning curve does little to offset the manual effort, as any shift in vendor format or line content resets its memory and restarts the correction cycle.
The Payables Agent has limited support for the routing and approval of invoices
Microsoft’s Payables Agent is a helpful starting point for smaller AP departments that process simple, low-volume invoices. But once volume, exception rates, or departmental involvement increase, the system’s limited workflow structure quickly becomes a constraint. It automates intake and draft creation, but leaves routing, validation, and exception handling largely manual and limits “AI automation” to a guided automated data entry tool.
💡 The practical way to think about the issue
You will have to think of the Payables Agent as a lightweight automation layer, not a workflow engine. It’s best suited for straightforward AP teams where one person or a small group handles intake, review, and approval. As invoice volume grows or more departments, such as purchasing, receiving, logistics, and their approvers, the lack of cross-functional routing, dynamic exceptions, and shared visibility slows the process instead of accelerating it.
⚙️ The technical reason(s) underlying the issue
The Payables Agent is architected for linear invoice progression: intake → extraction → draft → approval → post. It does not support multi-branch routing, parallel approvals, or conditional workflows. Duplicate detection occurs downstream, after the invoice draft is created, rather than upstream at ingestion. Exceptions such as missing vendor data or unrecognized invoices cannot be automatically routed for resolution. Approvals are confined to licensed Business Central users, with no native mechanism for involving external reviewers.
📉 The impact on AP operations
The absence of workflow flexibility creates visible bottlenecks as scale increases. AP teams rely on manual coordination outside the system (e.g., email, chat, and spreadsheets) to resolve exceptions and manage approvals. Duplicate invoices slip through until late in the process. Audit trails fragment across tools, and cycle times stretch as staff chase missing context or feedback. For multi-entity or high-volume environments, the Payables Agent becomes more of a coordination challenge than a control advantage.
Business Central workflows and DIY workflows using Power Automate don’t support document-driven processes
Building a custom accounts payable (AP) workflow with Power Apps, Power Automate, and Business Central often starts with good intentions: stay within Microsoft’s ecosystem, use familiar tools, and minimize licensing overlap. In practice, however, AP automation is a combination of document-driven and data-driven workflows. Although the Microsoft stack can move data between systems, it lacks the cohesive document management, exception handling, and routing logic needed to orchestrate the entire invoice lifecycle.
💡 The practical way to think about the issue
Power Apps + Business Central workflows can route approvals and trigger conditions, but they are best suited for structured data processes such as approvals tied to field values or status changes. True AP processing revolves around documents: invoices, purchase orders, receipts, and vendor correspondence. Re-creating a document-centric experience inside Power Apps often means stitching together multiple services (e.g., SharePoint for storage, Power Automate for routing, and Outlook for notifications) and then manually syncing permissions and links.
⚙️ The technical reason(s) underlying the issue
Business Central workflows focus on record data (vendor, amount, PO number) but have no inherent awareness of the source document. Power Automate can route files, but every condition (e.g., duplicates, missing receipts, and vendor changes) requires a separate flow, custom logic, and connector maintenance. Storing invoice images in SharePoint or OneDrive introduces security and compliance challenges: broken links, independent permission models, and fragmented search results. Non-BC users can approve via email or Power Apps, but those approvals live outside the transaction record, forcing teams to piece together the audit trail manually.
📉 The impact on AP operations
DIY workflows work well for small, stable environments but quickly accumulate technical debt. Each exception or policy update requires flow changes, JSON edits, and retesting. Approval trails fragment across systems, document links break, and non-BC participants become disconnected from the process. Over time, the maintenance effort outweighs the initial savings, especially as invoice volume, entities, and compliance requirements grow.
The Result:
Each red pill reality in this blog series exposes the limitations of the Payables Agent. We offer Datahaven 365 to help you unify documents, data, and workflows throughout Business Central—not just AP. The result is complete visibility, faster approvals, and automation that scales with the complexity of your business.
Check out the other Blogs in this Series:
Red Pill Realities: Extensibility, Cost, and Other Important Constraints of the Payables Agent
Red Pill Realities: The Document Capture Constraints of the Payables Agent
Red Pill Realities: The Hidden Risks of how the Payables Agent Stores Documents
Red Pill Realities: The Truth About Data Extraction and Verification with the Payables Agent
About the Author
About Brad Bimson As the CEO of Datahaven 365, Brad is passionate about helping companies streamline their processes leading to savings in time, costs, and improved customer service. Brad wants to connect w/ Microsoft Dynamics users, partners & ISVs who want to leverage Dynamics.
Comments