BisTrack Invoice and AP Automation

What manual AP looks like in BisTrack

Without an automation layer, vendor invoices reach an LBM dealer the way everything else does: PDFs attached to supplier emails, paper riding along with deliveries, statements from the buying group if you're a co-op member. Someone in the office reads each one, keys it into payables, and checks it against the purchase order and what actually got received. A clean stock invoice takes a few minutes. An invoice covering a partial shipment, with a price that moved since the PO was cut, turns into a hunt through screens and paper.

BisTrack reviewers are frank about invoice-matching friction in the system, though the loudest complaints sit on the receivables side: matching customer payments to invoices gets described as cumbersome and spread across multiple screens, there's reportedly no way to unmatch an invoice once it's matched, and finding the backup documentation for a specific transaction can be difficult. The payables side doesn't draw the same public complaints. Its cost is the keying itself, invoice after invoice, plus the PO lookup on every mismatch, and it compounds at month end.

What AP Assist does

AP Assist is Epicor's AP automation product, sold for BisTrack specifically. The capture side reads invoices from PDFs and scans with what Epicor describes as AI-powered OCR and form recognition that adapts to new vendor layouts automatically, so there's no template to set up when a new supplier starts invoicing you. The validation side matches captured invoices against purchase orders and receipts, supports both two-way and three-way matching, and pushes only the exceptions to a person. Approved invoices land in BisTrack as payables with the invoice images linked. There's a companion product, AR Assist, for the receivables side.

Two things Epicor doesn't publish are pricing and launch dates, so both are rep questions. The design contrast with Epicor's order-side add-on is also worth knowing before you buy either. BisTrack Order Entry Automation, the PO-intake product, is built on per-customer OCR templates and makes no AI claims, while AP Assist is the template-free one. On the BisTrack product line, invoices are where Epicor put the AI first.

What Epicor ECM does with BisTrack

On some Epicor ERPs, ECM (the platform formerly sold as DocStar) is the AP automation route. Its invoice capture and matching workflows for Prophet 21, for example, are documented and real. For BisTrack, the documented integration runs the other direction: the 2023.2 release added a Send to ECM button when printing sales orders and quotes, which uploads the PDF into an ECM workflow and can trigger a DocuSign signature request. It requires ECM 18.2 or later plus the DocuSign module, and it's outbound document routing, not invoice capture.

We could not find any documentation of ECM's AP invoice workflows shipping for BisTrack, and with AP Assist existing as the purpose-built product, ECM is probably not the AP path Epicor intends here. If a reseller pitches ECM AP automation for your BisTrack shop, ask for a BisTrack customer running it in production before you buy.

When a custom layer fits

For straightforward vendor-invoice capture into BisTrack, a first-party product with matching and exception routing is hard to beat, and we'd tell most dealers to evaluate AP Assist before anything custom. The custom case shows up at the edges: approval or matching logic specific to how you buy (multi-branch approval chains, your own tolerance rules), invoice flows AP Assist doesn't handle cleanly, or the wish to run order intake and AP intake through one system you own instead of two subscriptions.

The mechanics mirror custom AI order entry, the kind of system we build at Airdev. With BisTrack it works like this:

1. 1It watches the AP inbox and picks up each vendor invoice as it arrives, PDF or scan.
2. 2It extracts the header and line items, whatever the vendor's layout.
3. 3It matches the invoice against the purchase order and receipts in BisTrack and flags anything off, like a price that moved since the PO or a quantity that doesn't match what was received.
4. 4It stages the payable for a person to approve. Nothing posts without that sign-off.

This is the system we build for BisTrack shops. Talk to us

A note on the BisTrack API

The write path for a custom AP layer is the BisTrack API, and two things are worth knowing before anyone writes code. First, it's a separately licensed product; Epicor's own Automation Studio page notes that customers must also be BisTrack API users, so confirm it's in your contract. Second, Epicor's API page lists financial data exchange and document handling among the endpoint groups, but it doesn't spell out vendor invoice creation publicly, so make "can we create payables through the API" a direct question to Epicor early in scoping.

Public documentation for BisTrack integration work is thin in general. The community lives in the dbUG user group rather than Epicor's main forums, and there's no community-maintained API reference like the one Prophet 21 developers lean on. None of that is a blocker, but it rewards teams who have built against BisTrack before.

Frequently asked questions