Start with your platform
Dynamics 365 is not one product, and the market around it is built differently per platform. Almost every comparison you find online treats them as one, and that is why those answers do not hold up.
| Finance & Operations | Business Central | |
|---|---|---|
| What it does with invoices itself | A matching policy with tolerances per line, and a variance icon on every line outside tolerance | Registers vendor invoices against order and receipt; e-invoices through E-Documents, including UBL and Peppol |
| What it does not do itself | Read a PDF | Read a PDF |
| Capture on top | Microsoft Invoice capture, ExFlow, Medius | Continia Document Capture, Zetadocs, ExFlow |
| Bank reconciliation on top | through an add-on | Continia Banking |
| Claridy | yes, reading and writing back | yes, reading and writing back |
Claridy runs on both, including side by side during a migration from Business Central to Finance & Operations.
What Dynamics already does
Fair is fair: there is more in the box than people assume, and the part that is there works.
On Finance & Operations, the matching policy decides which checks apply per invoice line and what tolerance is allowed. When a line falls outside tolerance, Finance & Operations puts a variance icon on it and holds the invoice. That is a full matching engine and it is there without buying anything.
On Business Central, you register vendor invoices against the order and the receipt, and with E-Documents Business Central receives e-invoices as structured data, including UBL and Peppol. For a supplier who invoices over Peppol there is nothing to read, because the fields arrive filled in.
What neither platform does is turn a PDF into invoice lines. The entire market around Dynamics is built on that gap.
Your four routes
Route 1: nothing extra, just what is in Dynamics. Entering or registering invoices by hand, and letting the Finance & Operations matching policy or the Business Central order link do their part. Fits a low invoice volume, a supplier base that already invoices over Peppol, or an organisation that has just gone live and wants to see where the friction actually is before buying anything. The cost sits inside your existing licence. Where it stops: at the PDF. Every invoice that arrives as an attachment costs entry time.
Route 2: a capture layer. Software that reads the invoice, pulls out the lines and stages it in Dynamics. Four of them matter.
Continia Document Capture is the best known on Business Central. It matches against purchase orders and receipts, at header or line level, with a configurable variance on the unit cost. On a header-level difference Continia creates a variance line so the registered amount adds up; when there is no match you get a notification and can still register. The price is on their site and runs by transaction tier: € 12 per month up to twenty-five documents, € 53 up to two hundred, € 211 up to a thousand.
Microsoft Invoice capture is the native capture step on Finance & Operations, turning a PDF into a pending vendor invoice, after which the Finance & Operations matching policy takes over. A hundred transactions per tenant per month are included in your Finance licence; above that you buy more, at three hundred dollars per thousand transactions.
Zetadocs runs on Business Central only, reads without a template per supplier and matches at line level against order and receipt. Automatic matching does require an exact price match: if the same unit cost appears on two order lines, the line waits for a person. Pricing is a fixed amount per page regardless of the number of invoice lines, but the amounts are not on their site.
ExFlow runs on both platforms, matching at header and line level against purchase orders, projects and receipts, with configurable tolerances. Peppol runs through their separate ExFlow E-Invoicing product. Prices are not public.
Fits teams whose main cost is entry time and whose invoices usually carry a PO number. Where it stops: at flagging. Outside tolerance, the difference is marked and the invoice goes to a person.
Route 3: an AP suite. A full accounts payable platform alongside Dynamics, with its own matching, its own approval flows and its own supplier portal. Medius is the best known in this segment, with native connectors to Dynamics among others. Fits high volumes, multiple countries, and organisations that deliberately want AP to live outside the ERP. The cost is enterprise contracts without published prices. Where it stops: not so much on function as on weight. It is a second system with its own implementation, its own administration and its own version of the truth about your payables.
Route 4: an intelligent action layer. Software that does not sit next to your ERP but on top of it, carries out the work after capture, and writes the result back into Dynamics. That is the category Claridy sits in. Fits teams from roughly a hundred vendor invoices a month, with multiple entities or a lot of exceptions, who want the investigation work gone rather than the typing. The price is € 499 per month, fixed and published. Where it stops: at the cases with no precedent. Those go to a person, with the groundwork already done.
Where the time actually goes
The percentages vendors quote apply to the invoice where everything lines up. That invoice exists, and it does flow through. But it is not where your team spends its days. The question is not whether your software matches, but what happens to everything that does not. For every route above the answer is the same: it comes back to a person, who then has to work it out. Five shapes turn up in almost every Dynamics team.
Differences outside tolerance. The invoice says twelve, the order says ten. Finance & Operations puts an icon on it, Continia flags the line. After that someone works out which of the two is right, calls or emails the supplier, waits for a credit note and posts.
No PO number on the invoice. Then there is nothing to match against. Someone finds the order by supplier, amount and date, and links it by hand.
A parts distributor on Dynamics put it this way in January: with 1.1 million item numbers, every invoice is a matching puzzle. Four people in finance, 65,000 purchase invoices a year, and the freight invoices arrived as CSV that someone lined up against the customers by hand. Not because their software was bad, but because that is the work that is left over.
Consolidated invoices and partial deliveries. One invoice across three orders, or an order delivered in four parts. Continia can link an invoice to several receipts, but pointing them at each other stays a human job as soon as the amounts do not line up one to one.
Coding beyond the default. Cost centre, project, department: the dimensions that do not follow from the order get filled in by a person. On Finance & Operations that means several financial dimensions at once.
Multiple entities. One invoice to be split across two legal entities, or a group running Finance & Operations next to Business Central. That happens more often than vendors suggest, because it is the normal result of an acquisition or a migration still in progress.
What you end up with is a match rate that looks high on paper and disappoints in the monthly numbers. The clean part runs by itself, and your team still spends its days in the exceptions. That is where the hours are.
If you want to know what that costs at your volume, work it out with the calculator. Or book a demo on your own invoices.
Claridy in short
| What for | Purchase invoices from arrival to payment: reading, matching, coding, posting and handling exceptions |
| ERPs | Exact Online, NetSuite, Microsoft Dynamics 365, reading and writing back |
| Migration | None. Your books stay where they are |
| Price | From € 499 per month: up to 500 invoices, one entity, one ERP connection. Each extra entity € 250, modules such as three-way matching and reconciliation € 250 each |
| What is not added | no price per invoice, per document or per user, cancellable monthly |
| Peppol | UBL now, Peppol connection in Q4 2026 |
| Live in | First workflow in two weeks, on your own data |
| Approach | The system proposes first and your team approves. Then you set the line above which it acts by itself |
| Lower bound | From roughly 100 invoices a month |
| Languages | Invoices in any language, no template per language or per supplier. The interface is English |
| Security | CASA Tier 2 audit (TAC Security, February 2026), SOC 2 in preparation |
| Where it differs | It acts after capture: splitting across order lines, coding on all your dimensions, investigating differences and emailing the supplier |
Claridy also runs on Exact Online and Oracle NetSuite.
What Claridy adds
Line-level matching, also without a PO number. Several orders on one invoice, partial deliveries, consolidated invoices. If the number is missing, Claridy finds the order by supplier, quantity, amount and date, and shows how confident it is before you approve.
Differences get resolved, not just flagged. Claridy pulls in the order, the receipt and the supplier's email, puts one decision in front of you, and emails the supplier with the difference already worked out when something is missing.
Coding on your history. Ledger account, financial dimensions, entity, learned from how your team posted the previous eleven invoices from this supplier.
Multiple entities as the starting point. Several companies, Finance & Operations next to Business Central, and a single invoice split across two entities.
Instruct it in plain language. You describe how the work should go the way you would brief a new colleague, let it run in parallel, and then set the threshold above which it posts on its own. Every correction your team makes becomes a rule, so the same exception does not come back next month.
The AI reads, the rule decides. The model reads and interprets; the decision that leads to a posting is deterministic and logged. The same invoice always produces the same posting, and afterwards you can show which rule applied and what context was pulled in.
Your current tool does not have to go. Claridy can sit behind Continia or Invoice capture and do the work they leave. More often it is simpler to run everything through in one go, and we work that out in the demo on your own invoices.
When you do not need Claridy
Below roughly a hundred vendor invoices a month there is too little repetition to learn from, and a capture layer is cheaper.
If you are on Business Central with one company, PO numbers on almost every invoice and a manageable supplier base, Continia does what you need and an extra layer will not pay for itself.
If most of your suppliers invoice over Peppol, the capture step largely disappears and the question moves to what happens next. If that is not much, you do not need to add anything.
And if you deliberately want accounts payable to live outside Dynamics, with its own supplier portal and its own version of the truth, an AP suite is the more logical choice.
Bank reconciliation in Dynamics
The same logic applies on the bank side. Dynamics reconciles whatever carries a clean reference, and on Business Central, Continia Banking brings reconciliation inside the standard flow. What is left over comes back to your team.
Four shapes keep returning: the partial payment where it is unclear which part it covers, the bulk payment with a remittance advice as a separate PDF in a separate email, the payment difference caused by bank charges or a discount taken, and the amount that has to be split across two legal entities.
Claridy reads the remittance advice whatever its layout, applies the lines to the right open items, splits across entities and explains every match. There is more on this on Reconciliation and in the piece on bank reconciliation and cash application.
Frequently asked questions
On both, reading and writing back, and on both at once during a migration.
Microsoft Invoice capture is Microsoft's own capture step on Finance & Operations: PDF to pending vendor invoice, after which the Finance & Operations matching policy takes over. Continia Document Capture is a partner product on Business Central that reads the invoice, matches it against the purchase order and auto-approves within your tolerance.
Finance & Operations has a matching policy with tolerances per line and flags deviations. Business Central registers invoices against order and receipt. What neither does is read the PDF and work out why a line deviates.
No. Claridy reads and posts on your existing setup; nothing is migrated.
That is exactly when it helps. Claridy works across both systems during the transition, so accounts payable does not have to be set up twice.
No. Claridy can sit behind Continia and do the work Continia leaves, or take over end to end. Which is better value depends on your volume and your number of entities, and we work that out together.
UBL today, Peppol connection in Q4 2026. Business Central already receives Peppol itself through E-Documents, and nothing that happens after receipt changes because of it.
€ 499 per month up to 500 invoices, one entity and one ERP connection. Each additional entity € 250, modules € 250. Cancel monthly. Everything is on the pricing page.
The first workflow is live in roughly two weeks on your own data. Nothing is migrated, so the time goes into the briefing, not the connection.
Sources: Continia Document Capture product page and price list, checked 2026-08-18. Equisys on Zetadocs and SignUp Software on ExFlow, checked 2026-08-18. Microsoft Learn, "Invoice capture solution" and "Accounts payable invoice matching", checked 2026-08-18. Microsoft Learn, E-Documents in Business Central, checked 2026-08-18. Claridy pricing: claridy.ai/prijzen, checked 2026-08-18.
Claridy is an independent vendor and is not affiliated with Microsoft. Microsoft, Dynamics 365, Business Central and Finance & Operations are trademarks of Microsoft Corporation.