EM Invoicing brings supplier invoice processing into EM Cloud™. Invoices arrive by email or scanner, import automatically, and are matched against received quantities and costing — so your team reviews the exceptions instead of keying every line.

Supplier invoices sit upstream of almost everything: stock accuracy, supplier management, cost visibility, pricing and margin. When they are processed by hand, every one of those things inherits the delay and the error rate.

This article covers what manual invoice processing actually costs, how EM Invoicing changes the workflow, and where it fits for grocery, fuel, liquor, bakery, butcher, seafood and multi-store retailers.

What is EM Invoicing?

EM Invoicing is the supplier invoice module inside EM Cloud™, the GaP Solutions cloud back-office system. Your team sends invoices to a designated email address, or submits them using a dedicated scanner. In most cases, original supplier invoices sent by email give the best results — a clean digital original reads more reliably than a scan of a printout.

Once EM Cloud™ imports the invoice, your team reviews it against received quantities and costing. The system surfaces what needs attention: quantity variances, supplier cost changes, and the retail price impacts that follow from them.

How much time does manual invoice processing actually take?

More than most retailers assume. The Institute of Financial Operations & Leadership’s Accounts Payable Automation Trends 2025 found that 63% of respondents spend more than 10 hours per week on invoice processing, and 66% still manually enter invoice data into ERP systems. In the 2024 edition of the same research, the leading process challenges were too much manual data entry (51.4%) and data errors or discrepancies causing delays (47.1%).

The benchmark gap is starker. Ardent Partners, surveying 212 AP and finance leaders, found best-in-class organisations process an invoice for $2.78 against $12.88 for everyone else, in 3.1 days rather than 17.4 days, with an exception rate of 9% versus 22%. Closer to home, the ATO estimates paper and PDF invoices generally cost between $27 and $30 to process, and that eInvoicing can bring that under $10.

Meanwhile the cost side keeps moving. Deloitte Access Economics reported in May 2026 that the Australian retail cost base rose 2.1%, with real wages down 1.3% year-on-year and discretionary spending growth slowing to 0.7%. Award minimum rates rose 4.75% from 1 July 2026. The Australian Retail Council’s Chief Economist has described the situation plainly:

When margin is under that kind of pressure, hours spent re-keying invoice data are hours not being spent on the decisions that protect it.

How does EM Invoicing work inside EM Cloud™?

Six steps, from supplier to accounting system:

The shift is from checking every invoice line from scratch to working a filtered list of what actually differs. That is where the time comes back.

Matching invoices against received quantities

Invoice matching is the checkpoint between receiving stock and paying for it. With EM Invoicing, your team compares what the supplier invoiced against what the store actually received, inside EM Cloud™.

If the invoiced quantity does not match the received quantity, that difference is visible before the invoice goes any further. Caught at this point it is a two-minute query to a supplier. Caught three weeks later, after the stock has sold and the retail price was set off the wrong cost, it is considerably more expensive.

Reviewing variances before they reach your reporting

A variance might be a quantity difference, a supplier cost change, a product issue or a straightforward invoice error. EM Cloud™ highlights them on screen so your team reviews them before they flow into reporting, pricing or margin decisions.

This is the difference between a process that catches small problems and one that accumulates them.

Seeing supplier cost changes in time to protect margin

This is the quiet one. A supplier raises the cost of a line. Nobody reviews the retail price. The product keeps selling at the same rate, so nothing looks wrong on the sales report — but the margin has gone, and it keeps going until someone notices.

EM Invoicing puts cost changes in front of your team during the invoice process, while there is still a decision to make. For retailers running high product volumes on thin margins, catching that at invoice stage rather than at month-end is the whole point.

Exporting to Xero, MYOB or your accounting system

Once reviewed and processed, invoices can be exported to accounting platforms including Xero and MYOB, connecting store operations to the finance workflow. Xero’s own guidance makes the case for automating this step:

Where eInvoicing and Peppol fit in

Worth being clear on this, because it is widely misreported. There is no mandatory business-to-business eInvoicing requirement in Australia. The Commonwealth mandate applies to Non-corporate Commonwealth Entities, which must lift eInvoicing to 30% of invoices received by 1 July 2026 and enable automated sending and receiving by December 2026.

What that means practically: if you supply a Commonwealth agency, expect to be asked to onboard to Peppol. If you don’t, there is no legal deadline — but more than 400,000 Australian businesses are already on the network, and the ATO’s cost figures explain why. Either way, the operational argument for reducing manual invoice handling stands on its own.

Built for grocery, fuel, liquor and fresh food retailers

Every segment handles supplier invoices differently:

• Grocery — high supplier volumes and frequent cost changes
• Fuel and convenience — reducing back-office admin in a busy trading environment
• Liquor — invoice review across changing ranges, promotions and supplier pricing
• Bakery — invoices spanning ingredients, packaging and retail stock
• Butcher, seafood and fresh food — visibility over supplier costs and received quantities where weight and yield matter
• Multi-store operators — one consistent invoice process across every location

Sources

• Institute of Financial Operations & Leadership — Accounts Payable Automation Trends 2025 (global survey, June 2025)
• Ardent Partners — AP Metrics That Matter in 2025 (survey of 212 AP and finance leaders)
• ATO — Benefits of eInvoicing
• ATO — eInvoicing for government
• Xero — Accounts payable process (Australia)
• Deloitte Access Economics — Retail Forecasts, May 2026
• Australian Retail Council — Retail spending shows steady start to 2026