The finance team at a mid-sized manufacturer received invoices every way a supplier could send one: PDF attachments, scans of paper, photographs, the occasional spreadsheet. Two people spent most of their day opening a shared mailbox, reading each invoice, and keying the supplier, amount, tax and line items into the accounting system by hand. It was slow, it was dull, and it was where late-payment problems started — an invoice that sat unopened for a week was an invoice that missed its terms.
The challenges we had to solve
- Invoices arrived in no consistent layout, so a fixed template would only ever cover a fraction of suppliers.
- A wrong amount or a wrong supplier paid automatically is a real loss, so the system had to know when it was unsure.
- Matching an invoice to its purchase order and goods receipt mattered as much as reading it.
- The team had to stay in control of what got posted; this was their ledger, not the tool’s.
How we approached it
We started with the document processing, not a grand redesign of the payables function. The system reads each invoice, extracts the fields that matter, and matches it against the purchase order and goods receipt already in the system. Where it can read everything cleanly and the three-way match agrees, the invoice is prepared for posting. Where it cannot — a smudged scan, a new supplier, an amount that does not match the order — it goes to an exception queue with the document and the reason it stopped, for one of the team to resolve.
That confidence threshold is the heart of it, and we set it deliberately cautious to begin with, so more went to a person than strictly needed while the team built trust in what the tool got right. The work built into the system they already used to approve and pay, rather than asking them to log into something new. We measured against the share of invoices that posted without a person retyping them, and against how quickly an invoice moved from arrival to ready-for-approval — the number that actually governs whether terms are met.
Where it stands
The routine majority of invoices now reach the approver without anyone keying them, and the two staff spend their day on the exceptions and on supplier queries — work that needs a person. The shared mailbox is no longer a place where invoices go to wait. As the team grew comfortable, they tightened the threshold themselves, which felt like the right way round.