Webinar findings: AI supplier invoice reconciliation for events.

The admin that eats a project team's week is exactly what AI is getting good at. Proposals, budgets, reporting and, top of the list for most agencies, checking supplier invoices against what was agreed.

In our latest webinar, Qondor CEO Nils Olav Rislå shared where we think the meetings and events industry is heading. Then our AI lead, Marius Nagel-Petersen, showed our first AI agent working live: an agent that reconciles supplier invoices against your budget and flags every difference for you to decide on.

Here's what we covered, and what it means for event agencies and TMCs.

Three key learnings from the webinar.

1. Execution is getting automated. Admin work like budgets, reconciliation and reporting is moving to AI. People stay in charge of judgement, creativity, negotiation and client relationships.

   
   

2. Supplier invoice reconciliation is the obvious place to start. It came up again and again in our customer discovery. One invoice can take hours to check by hand. With the agent, it takes minutes.

   
   
3. You stay in control. The agent reads and matches every line. Nothing is approved, changed or disputed until a person decides.

Watch the webinar recording.

Where is the meetings and events industry heading?

Qondor CEO Nils Olav Rislå opened with four forces we believe will reshape agencies and TMCs by 2030.

1. Execution gets automated. Proposals, budgets, reconciliation and reporting are the tasks AI is getting good at fastest. Read more on the M&E tasks AI will change first.

   
   

2. Clients buy outcomes. Expect more questions about why an event is happening, what the client is paying for and whether you can prove it worked.

   
   

3. Speed becomes the standard. Clients already write briefs with AI. By 2030, few will wait two weeks for a proposal or budget.

   
   

4. Volatility is normal. Geopolitics, travel friction and sustainability pressure make replanning a daily task.

   
   

The agencies that win will understand their clients better, move faster and decide better. That means less time on admin and coordination, and more on oversight, client strategy and creative work. We wrote about this in how agencies can use AI without losing the human touch.

What is supplier invoice reconciliation, and why is it so hard?

Supplier invoice reconciliation means checking every line of a supplier's invoice against what you agreed in the budget. For an event, that covers the hotel, venue, catering, transport, AV and more. It is how you catch overcharges, wrong quantities and things nobody ordered before you pay.

Qondor's AI lead, Marius Nagel-Petersen, described a job most project managers know too well. The event ends and the invoices arrive. Every supplier has its own layout. Some are in other languages. Some run to 100 pages or more.

So someone sits with the invoice on one screen and the budget on the other, going line by line. With dozens of invoices per project, nobody can check every line perfectly. Money slips through.

One of our customers told us this adds up to hundreds of thousands in unexpected costs every year.
Marius Nagel-Petersen, AI lead, Qondor.

What does the supplier reconciliation agent actually do?

You upload a supplier invoice to the project in Qondor. The agent reads every line, checks it against your budget and sorts it into one of three groups. Lines that match need nothing from you. You only look at what is different.

• Auto-matched. Same quantity and price as the budget, even when the supplier calls it something else.

  
  

• Needs a check. The agent has found the likely budget line but something differs, like 52 room nights invoiced against 48 agreed.

  
  

• Not on the budget. Charges that were never agreed.

  
  

For every flagged line, you decide. Approve it and update the budget, correct the match, or flag it and go back to the supplier.

It's built for how event and travel invoices really look. Hotels that split room nights over many lines get put back together. Conference packages invoiced as one line are matched as a whole. Scanned, handwritten and foreign-language invoices are read like any other PDF. If the total is on page one and the detail is on page ten, the agent keeps both and matches at the level your budget uses.

Does the agent approve anything on its own?

No. The agent does the reading and matching. A person approves, corrects or disputes every flagged line, and every decision is recorded.

What did the live demo show?

Marius reconciled a demo invoice from a hotel in Lisbon, live. It used the hotel's own product names, some of them in Portuguese.

Demo highlights:

• Project ledger. Every supplier invoice on the project in one list, with who it is from and how far it has come.
• Side-by-side review. The supplier's invoice on one side, your matched budget lines on the other.
• Progress tracking. A bar shows how many lines you have decided on.
• One-click additions. Anything missing from the budget can be added straight from the review screen.
• Ready for payment. Once every line has a decision, mark the invoice as ready to pay.
• Reconciliation marks. Back in the budget, green means reconciled and orange means partly reconciled. Filter to see what is still waiting for an invoice.

Where does supplier invoice data go?

This is the question we get most. A hotel invoice often carries the rooming list: guest names, travel dates and sometimes dietary and accessibility notes. That is your client's attendee data, and you hold it on their behalf.

Drop that invoice into a general AI tool and you have added a vendor your client never approved, often in another region.

The Qondor agent stores and processes everything in Europe, keeps your invoices separate from other customers' data and handles them in line with GDPR. That is the strictest bar most clients will hold you to, so meeting it covers the rest. It is covered by your existing Qondor agreement. No new vendor to assess, and no new line on the security questionnaire.

How much time does Qondor's AI agent save?

Customers tell us one supplier invoice can take hours to check by hand, and days for the biggest. With the agent, it takes minutes. You confirm what it found instead of hunting for it, and you can get on with something else while it runs. Multiply that across every supplier on every project and it adds up to a lot of afternoons.

"We've been testing the agent on our supplier invoices and it's saving us a lot of time. No more reading every line against what we agreed. It shows us straight away what's billed differently or never ordered. So we only spend time on what actually needs a look, and we still approve everything ourselves."
IT and project manager, Travel Design

Do you need a finance system integration?

No. Your finance system keeps doing the accounting. The line-by-line check against what you sold happens in Qondor, and that is where the hours go. You get value from the first invoice you upload. Integrations are on the roadmap, so invoices can flow in from finance and go back marked as ready to pay.