Solutions / Invoice intake

Automated invoice intake

An agent watches the finance inbox, reads every invoice that arrives, and keeps a live register your team can trust — without anyone retyping a line.

Finance Document processing E-commerce · Professional services
12 → 2 min
of manual work per document, on our project
90–95%
of fields extracted on standard forms
0
manual re-entry into the register
Who it is for

CFOs, controllers and accountants handling 20+ supplier invoices a month across email, portals and paper scans.

Short answer

An invoice from the inbox lands in the register, parsed, in 1–2 minutes. On our project that meant 12 minutes of manual work per document before and 2 after; fields on standard forms are extracted with 90–95% accuracy.

The problem

Invoice entry is cheap work that quietly costs a fortune.

01

The register is always behind

Invoices arrive in three formats from four channels. Someone keys them in when they get a moment, so the payables picture is accurate on the day of the close and stale every other day.

02

Errors surface at the worst moment

A transposed total or a missed due date is invisible until a supplier calls or a payment is late. The cost is not the typing — it is the reconciliation afterwards.

03

Nobody can say where an invoice is

Approval lives in an email thread. Asking "did we pay this?" means asking a person, and the answer takes a day.

How it works

From trigger to result, step by step.

01

Watch the channels

The agent monitors the finance mailbox and any shared folder or supplier portal you nominate. New documents are picked up within minutes of landing.

02

Read the document

Layout-aware extraction pulls supplier, number, dates, line items, totals, tax and currency from PDFs and scans — including the messy ones photographed on a phone.

03

Check before accepting

Every field is validated: arithmetic, tax rates, duplicate numbers, a supplier that does not exist yet, a total that does not match the PO. Anything that fails goes to a person with the reason attached.

04

Write to your systems

Clean invoices are posted to the accounting system and the register, with the source file attached to the record so the audit trail is intact.

05

Route the exceptions

What the agent will not decide alone — an unknown supplier, an amount above your threshold, a mismatch against the PO — is routed for approval in Slack or email with one-click resolution.

Before / after

What changes on the ground.

Today, by hand
×Invoices retyped from PDFs into the accounting system
×Duplicates found during the monthly close, if at all
×Approval status lives in someone’s inbox
×Month-end reconciliation takes days
With the automation running
›Data extracted and posted within minutes of arrival
›Duplicates and arithmetic errors caught before posting
›Every invoice has a status and an owner
›The register is accurate on any day of the month
What you get

Delivered, not demoed.

›A running intake pipeline connected to your mailbox and accounting system
›A validation rule set tuned to your suppliers and tax rules
›An exception queue with approvals in the tool your team already uses
›Monitoring and alerts when extraction confidence drops
›Documentation and a handover session — the system is yours
Built with

We build in your stack rather than moving you onto ours. The list below is what this solution most often connects to — other systems are a scoping question, not a blocker.

LLM (replaceable) AWS Textract Gmail API Microsoft 365 QuickBooks Xero NetSuite Postgres n8n
Time to production4–6 weeks
Build priceFixed quote
First stepFree mini-audit
Honest limits

When this is not the right solution.

·Under roughly 20 invoices a month the manual cost is small enough that the payback stretches past a year — we will tell you so in the mini-audit.
·If your suppliers already send structured e-invoices (Peppol, EDI), most of the value is in the routing, not the extraction — that is a cheaper project.
·If nobody owns the approval rules today, the automation will surface that rather than fix it. Deciding who approves what is your call, and it comes first.

Questions we get about this one

On clean PDF invoices from repeat suppliers, field-level accuracy is high enough that the exception queue stays small. On photographed or handwritten documents it is not, which is exactly why every field carries a confidence score and low-confidence documents are routed to a person instead of being posted. We tune the thresholds during the pilot on your own invoices, not on a benchmark set.

Related

Where this sits in the rest of the work.

Service
Document processing
The wider service this belongs to: extraction, classification and routing for any document type.
Case
Document-to-ledger platform
A client month closes in four hours instead of three days, and a document takes two minutes of manual work instead of twelve.
Solutions
Support ticket triage
Every inbound ticket is classified, routed to the team that can actually solve it, and answered with a draft grounded in your own knowledge base.
Solutions
Document & email classifier
Inbound mail and documents are read, classified and filed to the right team, folder and system.
Solutions
Financial analyst agent
Spend is reviewed continuously rather than at month-end: variances explained, unusual transactions flagged with reasons, and savings proposed with the numbers behind them.

Bring us the process that hurts.

The mini-audit is free: we take your version of this process apart and tell you plainly whether automating it pays. If it does, you get a scope and a fixed price.