Payhawk’s Agent Fetch Cuts Vendor Invoice Time to Two Days

The problem Agent Fetch addresses is narrower than it sounds but materially painful for finance teams. Invoices for online services and recurring vendor payments, covering software subscriptions, digital advertising, cloud infrastructure and travel providers, are not delivered at the point of purchase. They sit inside vendor portals, requiring someone to remember the invoice exists, log in to the correct account, locate the document and attach it to the relevant transaction. Payhawk estimates this process takes an average of 23.8 days under a purely human workflow. Its Financial Controller Agent, which chases employees to complete the task themselves, had already reduced that to 12.6 days. Agent Fetch is designed to close the gap further, targeting an average of two days by completing the retrieval autonomously.

In practice, the agent logs into connected vendor accounts, locates the relevant invoice, extracts and codes the data, and matches it to the corresponding payment. During beta, it successfully retrieved invoices without human intervention in 68.6% of attempts. Payhawk has also had Agent Fetch verified through Cloudflare’s Verified Bots programme, which allows websites to cryptographically authenticate the agent as authorised automated traffic rather than an unidentified scraper, a distinction that matters as websites tighten access controls against automated access.

Hristo Borisov, co-founder and chief executive of Payhawk, said: “Retrieving invoices from vendor portals is what delays month end close, weakens real-time visibility, creates incomplete audit records, and can prevent businesses from recovering VAT.”

Agentic automation is becoming the central competitive battleground in B2B spend management. The segment is well populated, with Payhawk competing against platforms including Spendesk, Pleo, Yokoy and Airbase, alongside the broader ERP and accounts payable automation layer occupied by SAP Concur and Coupa. Most of these platforms have layered AI into workflow reminders or optical character recognition for receipt capture, but autonomous portal access represents a more significant technical and commercial step: the agent acts as the employee rather than prompting the employee to act.

The 68.6% autonomous success rate during beta is the most substantive performance figure in the release. It also implies a meaningful failure rate that will require human fallback in roughly three cases in ten, a nuance that finance directors evaluating month-end close accuracy will weigh carefully. Payhawk did not disclose whether the success rate has improved as the model has been refined or whether it varies materially by vendor category.

The VAT recovery argument is commercially significant in European markets, where businesses are entitled to reclaim input VAT on qualifying purchases but must hold the underlying invoice as documentary evidence. UK HMRC and EU tax authorities both require a valid VAT invoice for reclaim, and incomplete records remain one of the most common causes of disallowed claims. A two-day average retrieval cycle, compared with almost 24 days previously, meaningfully reduces the risk of invoices being missed before a VAT period closes. For Payhawk’s mid-market and enterprise customers operating across the 32-plus countries the platform serves, that compliance argument may be as persuasive as the efficiency gain.

The next markers to watch are the autonomous success rate as Agent Fetch scales beyond beta, whether named enterprise customers publish measurable outcomes, and how quickly competitors move to replicate portal-access capabilities.