Invoice processing, from 17 hours a month to about one.
A building contractor was taking in around 80 supplier invoices a month, each one opened, matched to a purchase order, and typed into Xero by hand. That ran to about 17 hours a month. We built a system that reads each invoice, checks it against the order, and prepares a Xero draft. The admin now clears a short approval list each morning.
The problem
The business took in around 80 supplier invoices a month. Each one landed as a PDF in the accounts inbox, and each one had to be opened, matched to the right purchase order, and typed into Xero line by line. At about 13 minutes an invoice, that came to roughly 17 hours a month, the best part of two working days.
The admin did the work at $30 an hour, so the entry alone cost around $510 a month. She did not have time to chase every mismatch, so invoices with the wrong amount or a missing PO number sometimes slipped through and turned up at month-end.
What we built
A system that watches the accounts inbox. When an invoice arrives it reads the document, checks it against the purchase order it expects, and prepares a Xero draft. The admin clears two short lists each morning. Because every invoice is matched to its purchase order before it reaches Xero, the slips that used to creep in, a wrong amount or a missing PO number, fell from about 2% of invoices to under 0.5%.
Every invoice is matched to its purchase order before it reaches Xero.
The admin clears a short list each morning, about 15 minutes.
- 01
It reads the invoice
Supplier, invoice number, amounts and line items come straight off the PDF.
- 02
It checks the order
The invoice is matched against the purchase order the system expects.
- 03
It drafts in Xero
If it lines up, a draft is created, formatted the way the accountant wants it.
- 04
The clean list
Each morning the admin scans the drafts and approves the clean ones, usually 5 to 10 minutes.
- 05
The flagged list
A bad scan, a new supplier or an amount that does not add up goes on a separate short list to check by hand.
What we had to figure out
About 1 in 8 invoices arrive as a photo, not a clean PDF
Some subcontractors send handwritten or photographed invoices. Rather than risk a shaky read and a wrong amount, the system hands those to the admin to key by hand. A clean two-minute handoff beats ten minutes unpicking a mistake later.
One supplier changed their format without warning
A supplier updated their template mid-project and the read broke. There is now a quarterly check of supplier templates, about twenty minutes, to catch that kind of drift before it causes a problem.
Zero pointless human involvement, not zero humans
The aim was never to remove the admin. Her time now goes to the invoices that need judgement, not the ones that only needed someone to press enter.
The result
Eighty invoices a month at about 13 minutes each came to roughly 17 hours of typing. Now it is about an hour of morning review, so close to 16 hours go back each month.
Those 16 hours a month, costed at the $30 admin rate and run across twelve months.
Mismatched amounts and missing PO numbers fell from about 2% of invoices to under 0.5%, once every invoice is checked against its order before it reaches Xero.
Document processing, the Xero integration and the infrastructure to keep it reading invoices every day.
Figures from the client.
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