UiPath Robot Linking SAP and Esker Invoices for a Luxury House

The client is a luxury fashion house in Italy that belongs to a global luxury group. Seven sister companies across Europe send it intercompany invoices. These land in Esker, which is the group's cloud platform for incoming supplier invoices, and sit in a queue for intercompany verification. For each one, someone had to locate it in SAP, post it, then go back to Esker and link it to the SAP document. All of it by hand.

Before the build, the process definition captured the manual baseline: each run took 24 minutes 54 seconds and needed 155 actions, 152 key presses and 96 mouse clicks, spread over 17 windows in 4 applications.

Where the effort went

• Typing everything twice. For every invoice, the date, number, amount and order reference were copied from one system into the other.
• Matching by sight. Amount is the only value both systems share, so matching was manual and prone to mistakes.
• Same routine, seven times. The steps repeated for each sister company, each with a different document type, VAT code and supplier code.
• Invoices left unlinked. If an invoice was posted in SAP but never linked in Esker, it stayed open in Esker, swelling the queue and the month-end reconciliation.
• Hours lost. Roughly 25 minutes of clicking and typing for each recorded run.

Copying invoices between systems is no longer the accountant's job. The robot is designed to match each invoice, book it in SAP and attach it in Esker, one company at a time, and to report anything it failed to match.

• One robot matches, posts in SAP and links in Esker the intercompany invoices of seven sister companies.
• The design target is an 80% cut in processing time per invoice, compared with roughly 25 minutes of manual work per run. Actual savings were not measured.
• Each run produces a per-company report, and unmatched invoices are logged so someone can follow up.
• No integration project needed. A robot using the same screens as the accountant joined two finance platforms within months.

A risk that is easy to overlook

If two finance systems share just one field, the amount, a simple match will pair the wrong invoices as soon as two of them carry the same value. So the robot works one company at a time, oldest invoices first, logs whatever it cannot match, and keeps a simulate step and production-only switches in front of every SAP posting and Esker link. A wrong match is stopped before it turns into a wrong entry in the books.