Payhawk has launched Fetch Agent, a new feature within its Financial Control Agent that automates supplier invoice retrieval.
According to the official press release, the Financial Control Agent previously reminded employees, on behalf of finance teams, to submit outstanding invoices or complete pending approvals. Fetch Agent takes this a step further by retrieving invoices autonomously, a process the company said is up to 12 times faster than manual retrieval. The feature is now available to all Payhawk business customers, following a beta phase in which more than 550 companies activated it, which Payhawk described as its most widely adopted beta functionality to date.
According to data from the tool, Payhawk's Financial Control Agent has reduced the time needed to submit expenses linked to supplier invoices by up to 46% since the start of 2026. The company said this addresses a persistent issue in financial operations: invoices for online services and supplier payments are often not issued at the point of purchase and are instead stored in supplier portals, requiring an employee to locate, access, download, and attach the correct document to the associated transaction.
Payhawk estimates that it takes an average of up to 23.8 days for an invoice to be incorporated into a company's enterprise resource planning (ERP) system. The Financial Control Agent has reduced this period to 12.6 days, and Payhawk said it aims to bring the average down to two days as adoption of Fetch Agent expands.
Autonomous retrieval and secure access
Fetch Agent is designed for online services and recurring supplier payments for which invoices are typically stored behind login credentials, including software subscriptions, digital advertising platforms, travel providers, cloud infrastructure providers, and online marketplaces. Once connected to a supplier's platform, the Financial Control Agent accesses the account, locates the relevant invoice, extracts it, posts it, and links it to the corresponding payment.
Moreover, during the beta phase, the feature recovered invoices directly in 68.6% of cases upon activation, Payhawk said. To support secure access, the company verified the agent through Cloudflare's Verified Bots programme, which allows websites to cryptographically authenticate automated traffic rather than treat it as an unidentified bot. Payhawk said this allows it to monitor transactions, identify pending documentation, and retrieve invoices while confirming which document corresponds to which payment.
Hristo Borisov, co-founder and CEO of Payhawk, said the recovery of invoices from supplier portals is among the factors that delay monthly closing, limit real-time visibility, create incomplete audit trails, and can prevent companies from recovering value-added tax (VAT). It was also noted that receipts for card payments made at physical points of sale are typically provided within five working days, whereas retrieving supplier invoices from online portals can take close to five times as long.
The launch reflects a broader move among expense management providers to embed artificial intelligence directly into financial workflows, shifting from tools that flag outstanding tasks to systems that complete them. Payhawk said the aim is to help finance teams close their processes with greater agility, freeing time for tasks that require more strategic input.
