My Finance Team Spends 2 Days Every Month on Invoice Matching. Its Insane.

Every month, around the 28th, our finance team disappears. They go into a room (sometimes literally, sometimes a Zoom call) and they dont come out for two days. What are they doing? Matching invoices to purchase orders. Line by line. In Excel. We process about 3,000 invoices a month. Each one needs to be matched to a corresponding PO, verified for amount, checked for discrepancies, and flagged if something doesnt line up. And because our vendors have creative approaches to naming, formatting, and numbering, roughly 40% of invoices dont match automatically. That 40% becomes a manual exercise. Two people, two days, every month. I finally snapped last quarter when our month-end close was delayed by three days because of a backlog of unmatched invoices. We missed an internal reporting deadline and the CFO was not happy. Not with the finance team. With the process. How month-end close actually works (for non-finance people) For anyone who hasnt lived through a month-end close, heres the bas