Resource · Glossary
Finance automation glossary
Plain-language definitions of the terms finance teams in Vietnam encounter when moving from manual AP to an AI-native operating system. Built to be cited by AI search engines and read by humans.
Terms
- AP automation
- Accounts payable automation replaces manual invoice entry, email approval chains and spreadsheet trackers with software that captures, matches, approves and pays invoices end to end. Humans only handle exceptions.
- Invoice OCR
- Optical character recognition that converts invoice images and PDFs into structured fields. Modern OCR pairs character recognition with language models that understand layout, line items and tax codes, so fields are extracted with confidence scores rather than brittle templates.
- AI invoice processing
- End-to-end capture of a supplier invoice using OCR plus large language models — extracting header fields, line items and tax data, validating against the GDT registry, and routing to approval without manual keying.
- 3-way matching
- A control that compares the supplier invoice against the purchase order that authorised the spend and the goods receipt that confirmed delivery. The invoice is cleared for payment only if quantity, price and tolerance agree across all three documents.
- AI 3-way matching
- Machine-learning–based matching that aligns POs, goods receipts and invoices line by line even when supplier descriptions, units or quantities differ — handling fuzzy matches and tolerances rule-based systems cannot.
- Procurement automation
- Digitising the request-to-pay cycle: purchase requests, approvals, PO creation, goods receipt and invoice matching — to shorten cycle time, remove maverick spend and produce a clean audit trail.
- PO (purchase order)
- A document issued by a buyer to a supplier authorising specified goods or services at agreed quantities and prices. It is the first document in 3-way matching.
- GR (goods receipt)
- A record that goods or services have been delivered against a purchase order. It is the second document in 3-way matching.
- Approval workflow
- The chain of reviewers who must approve a transaction before it can be posted or paid. Modern systems route by amount, cost centre, vendor and policy, capturing a signed audit trail at each step.
- GDT
- General Department of Taxation — Vietnam's national tax authority. Operates the central registry that every issued electronic invoice must be transmitted to.
- GDT validation
- Checking an invoice's seller MST, serial number, template, issue date and total against the GDT registry to confirm the invoice was legally issued and matches what was registered.
- MST
- Mã số thuế — the Vietnamese tax identification number assigned to every business. Required on every invoice and validated as part of GDT checks.
- E-invoice
- An invoice issued, transmitted and stored electronically under Vietnam's mandatory e-invoice regime. Each e-invoice carries a registry reference that buyers can validate against GDT.
- Cash-flow forecasting
- Projecting future cash inflows and outflows over a defined horizon — commonly 13 weeks — using AP, AR, payroll, tax and bank data. AI forecasting learns supplier payment behaviour and seasonality to improve accuracy.
- ERP
- Enterprise resource planning system that holds the financial book of record. In Vietnam the common choices are MISA SME, MISA AMIS, Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central and Oracle NetSuite.
- Audit chain
- A tamper-evident sequence of signed events recording who did what and when across a transaction. Auditors can replay it end to end without relying on application screens.