Automating Invoice Validation with Microsoft Fabric and Copilot
- Paul Miles
- 3 days ago
- 2 min read
Finance teams still spend too much time validating invoices by hand. Even when organisations use modern platforms like Xero, Workday or Sage, there are still emails, PDFs and spreadsheets floating around with their own versions of the truth.
When every invoice needs manual checking against contracted prices, purchase orders, VAT rates or GL codes, the process becomes slow, inconsistent and difficult to scale. Small errors slip through. Approval cycles drag out longer than they need to and the workload grows with it.
Microsoft Fabric is starting to change the way we approach these challenges.
With Copilot agents plugged into Fabric Dataflows, invoice data can be pulled in automatically from a variety of sources, including shared mailboxes, scanned PDFs, supplier portals and existing finance systems. Instead of rekeying information, everything arrives in Fabric in a clean, structured format.
From there, AI models hosted in Fabric’s Data Science experience can compare invoice details against purchase orders and supplier data in Xero, Workday or Sage. Line items, VAT rates, totals and dates are validated automatically. When something does not match, Copilot raises an alert, so finance teams only deal with exceptions.
Using Fabric Data Activator, as data flows in, validation workflows can trigger themselves in near real time. No more scheduled refresh windows or waiting for batch pipelines to finish. Invoices start processing almost as soon as they arrive.
The benefits are faster approvals, fewer errors and much cleaner financial data, all without asking teams to change the finance system they already rely on.
At F-Tek, we are exploring how this automated, Fabric-first approach can take pressure off finance operations and create smoother, more scalable processes across Xero, Workday and Sage environments.
Are you still running manual checks or juggling multiple systems for validation? If you would like to see how Fabric and Copilot could streamline your finance processes, the F-Tek team would be happy to walk you through it.
