The Agent That Ranks Which Invoice Gets Paid First

This is a personal, non-commercial side project I put together to learn — not a product or service, and not connected to any company I work with.

Post #11 asked a simple question: if payment order isn't really decided by due date, what else is doing the deciding — and can a rule capture it? Below is a small prototype that answers that with sample data.

Sample invoices scored

2 of 8

Reordered ahead of an older invoice because of a critical-vendor flag

€8,750

Invoice kept near the front for a 2%-in-10-days discount most payment runs miss

The script doesn't decide who's important. It just writes down, in one place, the same signals someone was already weighing invoice by invoice — a due date, a discount window, a flag for a critical vendor.

The sample data

Eight open invoices, each with a due date, an amount, whether a discount applies, and whether the vendor is flagged as critical. Two of them move ahead of an older invoice once those signals are counted.

open_invoices.csv — sample data

ID	Vendor	Amount	Due in	Discount	Critical	Rank
INV-03	Freight Carrier	€8,750	1 day	2%/10	No	1
INV-07	Utility Provider	€1,850	2 days	—	No	2
INV-01	Packaging Supplier	€12,400	3 days	—	No	3
INV-06	Marketing Agency	€5,100	4 days	—	No	4
INV-05	Contract Manufacturer	€41,000	6 days	—	Yes	5
INV-02	Core SaaS Platform	€3,200	9 days	—	Yes	6
INV-08	Legal Services	€9,300	11 days	—	No	7
INV-04	Office Supplies	€640	14 days	—	No	8

Sorted by printed due date

How it works

Load the invoicesReads a CSV with one row per invoice: vendor, amount, due date, discount terms, critical-vendor flag.

Compute days to dueFor each invoice, calculates how many days remain until the printed due date.

Apply priority signalsChecks two overrides: an active early-payment discount window, and a critical-vendor flag.

Re-rank the queueInvoices carrying a priority signal move to the front; everything else keeps its due-date order.

Print the suggested runLists the invoices in suggested payment order, flagging which ones moved.

Try it yourself

1 — Clone the repository

# same personal, non-commercial repo as the earlier demos in this series
git clone https://github.com/LuliBobo/cfo-agents.git
cd cfo-agents

2 — Add your own invoices (optional)

invoice_id,vendor,amount,due_in_days,discount_terms,critical_vendor
INV-05,Contract Manufacturer,41000,6,,true
INV-02,Core SaaS Platform,3200,9,,true
# ...add as many rows as you have open invoices

3 — Run it

python invoice_priority_agent.py data/open_invoices.csv

4 — Read the output

================================================================
  Invoice Priority Agent — Suggested Payment Order
================================================================

[Step 1] Loaded 8 open invoice(s) from CSV
[Step 2] Calculated days-to-due for each invoice
[Step 3] Checking for discount windows and critical-vendor flags

INV-05  Contract Manufacturer   41,000  due in 6d   CRITICAL  ⚠ REORDERED → #1
INV-02  Core SaaS Platform       3,200  due in 9d   CRITICAL  ⚠ REORDERED → #2

[Step 4] 2 of 8 invoice(s) reordered ahead of an older invoice
[Step 5] Suggested payment order printed above — due-date order alone would have missed both

What it's built from

Data source

A plain CSV of open invoices — no ERP connection, no live banking access, nothing beyond sample data.

Calculation

Standard Python, no external dependencies — a days-to-due calculation and two flag checks.

Configurable signals

Which flags count as "critical" and the discount threshold are command-line arguments, not hardcoded.

Read-only by design

The script only reads and reports. It doesn't schedule or send a single payment on its own.

What's in the repository

The same personal, non-commercial repository as the earlier demos in this series:

invoice_priority_agent.py — the full script used above
data/open_invoices.csv — the sample data shown in this walkthrough
The Idle Cash Agent from Post #10, the FX Monitoring Agent from Post #9, and the Invoice Agent from Post #3

View on GitHub Back to Post #11

Follow the series

Post #12 moves to the other side of that same ledger: money owed to the company, and why some collection reminders get paid within days while others get ignored for months.

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The Agent That Ranks Which InvoiceGets Paid First