A full day a fortnight, spent keying invoices

How to read this. The figures below are worked estimates, not a client result. They are modelled on the volumes a typical operational SME runs at, and the arithmetic is shown so you can put your own numbers in. We size the real case against your actual volumes before quoting.

A finance team receives roughly twenty supplier invoices a day into a purchase invoices mailbox. Each one is opened, read, keyed, looked up against the creditor ledger, matched to a purchase order where one exists, and checked against recent postings so the same invoice is not paid twice.

At about four minutes of handling each, that is close to five hours a week for one clerk. A full working day every fortnight, spent transcribing.

The system watches the existing mailbox, so nothing changes for your suppliers and no new portal appears. Each attachment is read for supplier, invoice number, date, net, VAT, gross and purchase order reference. Supplier names are matched against the ledger, amounts checked to a defined tolerance, VAT rounding handled, and duplicate invoice numbers caught before payment.

Anything the system is not confident about goes to a review queue with the document, the extracted values and the reason it stopped. Nothing is posted on a guess.

• Invoices scanned without a person. On a clean supplier base, 80 to 90 percent match automatically. The team handles the 10 to 20 percent that genuinely need judgement.
• Hours saved. 440 invoices a month at four minutes is about 29 hours. Removing 80 percent of that returns roughly 22 hours a month to the finance team.
• Duplicate payments caught before they leave. On five million pounds of annual payables, published benchmarks put duplicate and overpayment leakage at 0.5 to 1 percent. That range is an industry figure, not a promise, but it is the reason this is usually the first automation worth doing.
• Time to post. Days to minutes, so the ledger reflects reality when the board asks.