From 12 hours to 20 minutes on invoice entry
Illustrative example. Figures are representative targets, not a specific client claim.
Invoice entry is the classic hidden tax on a finance team. Documents arrive as PDFs in a dozen different layouts, someone reads each one and retypes the vendor, line items, and totals into the ERP, and a single fat-fingered figure can trigger a wrong payment that costs far more to unwind than the entry ever saved.
Why it's slower than it looks
No two suppliers format an invoice the same way, so a human hunts for the same fields in a different place on every document. That constant context-switching is what makes a few hundred invoices a month eat days, and it's exactly the work where attention slips and errors creep in.
The knock-on cost is reconciliation: when the ERP and the source document disagree, someone has to find and fix it at month-end, long after the mistake was made.
What we'd build
An extraction pipeline reads each invoice with OCR and an LLM, pulls out the vendor, line items, totals, and PO number, and validates them, format checks, PO matching, and duplicate detection, before anything is written to the ERP.
Confident, matched invoices post automatically; anything that fails a check, an amount that doesn't add up, a vendor it can't match, is routed to a person for a quick approve-or-correct rather than guessed at.
Validation before anything is written
Nothing posts blind. Every field passes format and range checks, is matched against the purchase order and existing vendor records, and is screened for duplicates so the same invoice never gets booked twice.
The result is a clean audit trail showing exactly what was auto-handled and what needed review, which is what makes month-end and any audit far less painful.
Results, and when not to
On any workflow with real volume this removes the vast majority of hands-on entry time and drops the error rate close to zero, with payback usually inside one to three months.
If a source system genuinely has no API or export, we're honest that the integration will be more brittle, and if you only process a handful of invoices a month, we'll tell you it isn't worth automating yet.
Finance staff re-keyed data from thousands of PDF invoices each month — slow, error-prone and demoralizing.
An extraction pipeline reads invoices, validates against POs, and pushes structured data into the ERP with a human-review step for exceptions.
Manual entry time collapsed from ~12 hours to ~20 minutes per batch, with fewer errors and a clean audit trail.
Map the flow
We trace where invoices originate and every system a value has to land in, using your real documents.
Prototype extraction
We build OCR + LLM extraction against your messiest real invoices, not a clean sample set.
Monitored draft
It runs alongside your team, who check output against the source until accuracy holds.
Post & watch
Confident invoices auto-post; a dashboard tracks auto-handle rate, exceptions, and throughput.
- Validate every field against your records before writing, never post blind.
- Route low-confidence items to a human instead of forcing a guess.
- Keep an audit trail of auto-handled vs reviewed items for month-end and compliance.
- Prototype against your real, messy documents, not a clean sample set.
Common questions
Does it work with our ERP or accounting tool?+
If it has an API or a supported import, yes, we post straight into it. We've connected modern cloud ERPs and older on-prem systems alike; where an API is missing we find the seam (import files, database, or a supported connector).
What about invoices in different layouts and languages?+
That's the whole point of the LLM step: it reads unstructured, varied documents rather than relying on fixed templates, and handles multiple languages. Edge cases it isn't sure about go to a human.
How do you prevent duplicate or fraudulent payments?+
Duplicate detection and PO/vendor matching run before anything posts, and payments always keep a human approval step. The automation prepares and validates; it doesn't pay blind.
Who owns the pipeline afterwards?+
You do. It runs in your accounts and tools, documented so your finance or ops team can adjust a validation rule themselves, with no lock-in to us.
Not sure which applies to you?
Book a free assessment and we'll map the highest-ROI automation opportunities for your business, honestly, including when it's not worth starting yet.
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