Summary: AP Intelligence is the specialized Zoe AI agent designed for Zone Capture and Zone Approvals users. Surfaced natively within NetSuite through the Zone Control Center standalone bundle, AP Intelligence allows accounts payable clerks, department managers, and financial controllers to investigate their accounts payable ledger, and approval pipelines using everyday natural language.
Use this article to learn about the AP Intelligence agent, how to use the AI agent, best practices, use cases, example prompt ideas, and finally learn how and when to manage Zoe’s individual memories.
Note: Zone Control Center and Zoe mimic each user's NetSuite and Zone permissions. If users have limited access to NetSuite and Zone solution data, those permissions will be automatically applied within Zone Control Center. Therefore customers will not be able to query or see data that they do not normally have access to view.
Learn how your NetSuite administrator can install Zone Control Center and Zoe here.
Learn about AP Intelligence Agent tools like the GRNI Balance Tool (IRNB) here.
What is the Zoe AP Intelligence Agent?
Zoe by Zone is our agentic orchestration layer, built directly into NetSuite. AP Intelligence is a Zoe AI agent that can pull data from any NetSuite, ZoneCapture, ZoneApprovals, AP Payments, and e-invoicing records.
AP Intelligence was built with deep contextual understanding of NetSuite, ZoneCapture, and ZoneApprovals. It has access to Zone’s KnowledgeBase as well as each customers’ unique customizations.
AP Intelligence is limited by each customer’s role and permissions. For example, if the customer has a limited view within NetSuite and ZoneCapture, then AP Intelligence is only able to use the information available to that customer given their role and permissions.
How Do I Engage with Zoe AP Intelligence Agents?
Each Zoe AI agent, like AP Intelligence, uses a plain language conversational chat to engage with our customers on the frontend, but secure and robust deterministic AI on the backend. This means the responses are reliable and less likely to hallucinate than generative AI like ChatGPT.
To use Zoe AP Intelligence, just ask questions in the 'chat'. Each submission counts as a single query - and you don't need to know SQL or how to build custom reports to get immediate answers.
Query Best Practices
- Be specific and add parameters
- Use date ranges
- Verify responses
- Iterate with follow-up questions
- Reset when necessary
- Split new conversations into new chat sessions
- Ask Zoe to remember critical information such as formatting and definitions. Learn more about Zoe's memories below.
Response Elements
When using Zoe's AI agents, there are three or four key elements in each query response: Summary Response, Results, Extended Analysis, and Suite QL Query.
Summary
Quick hitting response to the specific query. In the example below, there are 227 PO amendments made after bills were received. The response also listed the three most affected vendors.
Results
When responses include a list of at least 15 items, a separate “Results” element is provided to view the items in a table. When there are fewer than 15 items, the list can be viewed directly within the Extended Analysis. And in both cases, lists can be downloaded via CSV by selecting the download icon beneath all the response elements.
Extended Analysis
Responses always include an Extended Analysis - a longer analysis that looks at patterns, segmentation. Includes key findings and recommendations for next steps.
Suite QL Query
The last part of every response is what makes this “Explainable AI". The Suite QL Query shows exactly how each request is completed and provides an opportunity to verify that AI interpreted the query as intended.
Available Metrics & Functionality
The current scope of Zoe AP Intelligence is limited to operational metrics and will not include business metrics until the release of customization in Q4 2026. This is because the use of business metrics is too variable across companies to provide a consistently accurate experience for our customers without the customization capability.
Zoe AP Intelligence can currently use the following operational metrics:
Payment Performance & Cash Flow Metrics
- Days Payable Outstanding (DPO): On-demand DPO calculations for the closed period compared to prior quarters.
- On-Time Payment Rate: The percentage of supplier bills paid on or before their due date, alongside trends showing if late payments are improving or worsening.
- Total AP Liability: Real-time visibility into outstanding unpaid and overdue balances, including aggregate values grouped by currency and supplier.
- Late Payment Penalty Exposure: Estimated financial exposure to interest or late fees based on overdue supplier bills.
Workflow & Approval Efficiency Metrics
- Time-to-Approval (Approval Cycle Time): The average duration from the moment a bill is received to when it is fully approved, which can be broken down by department, subsidiary, and individual approver.
- Approval Bottlenecks: Tracking the number of days bills spend waiting in specific approver queues to identify delays.
- SLA Compliance Rate: The rate at which approvers meet their designated service-level agreement targets for invoice sign-offs.
- Approval Complexity: Evaluating the length and level of complexity (number of routing steps) within approval chains and how they impact approval times.
Purchase Order (PO) & Procurement Compliance Metrics
- Retrospective PO Rate: The percentage/number of purchase orders created retroactively (after the invoice receipt or bill date) rather than upfront, tracked by employee or department.
- No-PO Spend: The total value or count of vendor bills processed without a matching purchase order.
- Unauthorized PO Amendments: Tracking instances of purchase orders being edited or amended after the supplier invoice has already been received.
Supplier Variance & Matching Metrics
- Supplier Bill Variance: Total value of bills currently on hold due to variance, explanation for bill/PO variances and tolerance threshold configurations.
- Line-Level Variances: Discrepancies between the vendor bill and the PO/goods receipt, capturing metrics such as quantity variance, rate (unit price) variance, and total amount variance on a line-by-line basis.
- GRNI (Goods Received Not Invoiced) Balances: Real-time calculations of inventory received but not yet billed, detailing aging summaries of GRNI outstanding for more than 30, 60, or 90 days.
Fraud Prevention & Quality Control Metrics
- Duplicate Bill Rates: Detecting potential duplicate invoices submitted under the same supplier, date, and amount.
- Irregular Billing Patterns: Spotting unusual spikes or clusters in billing frequency (e.g., a supplier batch-submitting an unusually high volume of bills on a single day).
- Bank Detail Modifications: Monitoring the number of supplier bank details changed within a given week and identifying which NetSuite user made the change.
E-Invoicing & Capture Processing Metrics
- E-Bill Penetration Rate: The percentage of vendor bills received automatically as e-invoices (via PEPPOL or email XML) versus those captured through standard PDF OCR scanning .
- Failed E-Bill Delivery Rate: Metrics tracking failed outbound e-invoices, identifying delivery errors and standard failure reasons.
- Capture Recognition Accuracy: Running comparison checks between captured OCR fields (e.g., date, reference number, amount) against the final saved NetSuite vendor bill to calculate parsing accuracy.
The following terms are used by Zoe AP Intelligence, and can be used when prompting Zoe:
- Vendor bill analysis: open bills, overdue bills, bills by vendor, bills by aging bucket
- Purchase order tracking: open POs, PO-to-bill matching, partially received POs
- Zone Capture pipeline: invoices by capture status, processing times, match rates
- Zone Approvals: pending approvals, approval cycle times, rejected bills, approvals by approver
- Vendor performance: spend by vendor over time, payment history, early/late payment rates
- Cash flow: upcoming payment obligations, payment schedule by due date
AP Intelligence Uses Cases & Starter Prompts
Not sure where to get started? No problem! Check out the examples below.
Read through the following scenarios and open the drop down to read through prompt ideas for each scenario.
Approval Bottleneck Detection
- Which approvers take the longest to approve bills, and how often do their delays contribute to late payments?
- Show me all supplier bills that have been pending approval for more than 3 business days.
- What is the average time from bill received to bill approval, and how does it compare to last quarter? Break down by Department and Approver.
- Which department has the slowest bill approval times this month and who specifically is holding up the process?
- Which approvers have active delegation/OOO configured, and which of those have bills pending right now?
- Which departments have the most complex approval chains, and how does their approval time compare to simpler routing?
- Show me all bills redirected or escalated to a Super Approver due to approver unavailability in the last 30 days.
- Define business hours (7am–7pm). Which entities have the highest volume of bills approved outside business hours/weekends? Flag control risks.
Supplier Bill Variance & Performance Analysis
- Show me all supplier bills created this month with a price or quantity variance against the related PO or item receipt.
- Analyse supplier bills matched to a PO this quarter . Produce a line-level variance report (qty, rate, amounts, variance value and %).
- Identify all bill lines where the supplier billed more than was received or more than was agreed on the PO. Return records where: Billed Quantity > Received Quantity, and/or Billed Unit Price or Total Amount exceeds the PO value. Only include records with matched PO, Goods Receipt, and Bill records. Display the bill, PO, item, quantities, prices, amounts, and the calculated variance.
Purchase Order Compliance & Procurement Controls
- Show purchase orders pending approval with an associated supplier bill received.
- Which approvers have the most unapproved POs in their queue and how long have they been pending approval?
- Show me all POs that have been amended after the original bill was received, grouped by department.
- Which departments are creating retrospective POs, is this impacting payment performance? Show 6-month trend.
Payment Performance Reporting & DPO Analysis
- What is our Days Payable Outstanding (DPO) this quarter, and how does it compare to the previous quarter?
- What percentage of bills were paid on time this month, and which suppliers had the worst on-time rate?
- Show me a trend of our AP payment performance for the last 3 years. Show payments made late vs on time. Split by Subsidiary and then by Department. Provide insights.
AP Fraud Investigation
- Are there any potential duplicate bills, same supplier, same amount, same date?
- Show me all bills from the same supplier where the same amount has been submitted more than once in the last 60 days, inconsistent with the PO amount.
- Which suppliers have submitted bills with irregular patterns or unusual billing frequencies?
- Show me supplier bank details that have changed this week. Who made the change?
E-Invoicing Intelligence
- Show me vendors/suppliers that are sending us e-bills.
- Show me outbound e-bills for which delivery failed.
- What is the most common reason for e-bill delivery failure?
- Which countries does Zone & Co / ZoneCapture support for e-invoicing? Do you support [country]?
- Do we receive all vendor bills from Netherlands suppliers to our NL subsidiary as e-bills?
Learn how a Controller uses Zoe to help evaluate approval cutoffs and DPO performance in this video.
Learn how to use the GRNI Balance Tool in this video or check out this article on the tool here.
Zoe's Memory
Zoe AI agents were built with key memory elements to
- leverage all information you provide within each conversation
- remember the key information you provide between conversations
This was done to maximize the reliability of responses while minimizing the need to repeat prompts.
Why does this matter?
This improves Zoe’s ability to get you what you need, in the way you need with, without compromising reliability. You can ask Zoe AI agents to remember critical information about setup, formatting, preferences, and workflows. Zoe will remember this information between chats so you don’t have to share it every time.
How does Zoe's memory work?
Zoe has two kinds of memories: those within a conversation and those that get saved between conversations.
Within a conversation
Within a conversation (series of chats), Zoe agents will remember all/most of the information you've provided. This capability is similar to a single conversation with a person who remembers what you've just told them.
Most of the contextual awareness will reset each time a new chat is opened - unless customers ask Zoe to remember critical information such as preferences, account specific details, or workflows.
A customer’s chat history does not need to be cleared to “reset” the contextual awareness for each new session or conversation.
Key information remembered between conversations
Zoe builds a personal notebook about each customer, including:
- preferences
- account specific details
- Formatting
- workflows/responsibilities
This means that you don't need to re-explain your setup each time you start a new chat. And answers are tailored to your preferences.
How can I help Zoe remember or forget key information?
While Zoe will pick up on patterns and draw her own conclusions, you should manage her memories about you.
Periodically, or when your role changes, preferences shift, or responses aren't quite what you're expecting, ask Zoe "what do you remember about me"? Then tell Zoe to delete specific memories, clear everything and start fresh, or add new memories.