If someone at your company is still opening PDFs of invoices, manually copying data and pasting it into an ERP or Excel, you're losing money every day. Not because of that person's cost, but because of the errors, delays, and bottleneck that a manual process creates in 2026.
What AI Builder can do with an invoice
AI Builder is a component of Power Platform that includes pre-trained AI models. One of them is specifically designed to process invoices. You give it a PDF or image and it automatically extracts: invoice number, date, vendor, tax ID, detail lines, amounts, taxes, and total. Without training anything. It works from day one.
The model recognizes invoices in multiple languages and formats. Your invoices don't all have to be the same. I've processed invoices from vendors in 4 different countries with the same flow, without adjusting anything.
The complete flow: from email to validated record
The process I typically implement follows this sequence:
1. Receipt. An invoice arrives by email (or is uploaded to a SharePoint folder). Power Automate detects the attachment automatically.
2. Extraction. The flow sends the document to AI Builder, which returns all structured fields: vendor, amount, detail lines, due date.
3. Validation. The extracted data is cross-checked against your vendor database and payment terms. If everything matches, it registers directly. If there are discrepancies (amount out of range, unknown vendor), it's sent for human review with the data already filled in.
4. Registration. The validated invoice is written to Dataverse, SharePoint, or sent to the ERP via connector. A notification is generated to the approval person if applicable.
Real results
In a recent implementation, the administration team processed each invoice in about 15 minutes on average: open the email, download the PDF, read the fields, look up the vendor, enter the data, verify. With the automated flow, that time dropped to less than 1 minute for invoices that pass automatic validation (about 85%), and 3 minutes for those requiring manual review.
But the biggest impact wasn't the time. It was eliminating transcription errors, complete traceability of every invoice from receipt, and the team no longer spending 60% of their day on a repetitive task.
What you need to get started
AI Builder is included in Power Automate Premium licenses (and also available as an add-on). If your company already has Microsoft 365 licenses, you probably only need to activate Power Automate Premium for the users who will run the flow. You don't need additional infrastructure, servers, or Azure configuration.
The pre-trained invoice model works well from the first use. If your invoices have a very particular format, you can create a custom document model with AI Builder, training it with 5-10 examples of your own invoices.
Why this matters beyond invoicing
Invoice processing is the most obvious use case, but the same pattern (document comes in, AI extracts data, flow validates and records) applies to packing slips, purchase orders, quality forms, work orders, contracts. Once you have the first one working, scaling to other documents is a matter of days, not months.