Case study
Supplier invoices read by AI and booked into the accounting system
Summary
The problem
Supplier invoices arrived by email in every format and were keyed into the accounting system by hand. Reconciling the quarterly VAT return took days.
What we did
Built a pipeline on the client’s own mailbox and office suite: invoices are picked up from the mailbox, a language model extracts and checks the fields, files are stored and registered, duplicates and invoices addressed to the wrong company are caught, and approved invoices go to the accounting system. The model can be swapped between providers without changing the rules around it.
Outcome
In daily use. Designed so every invoice reaches the accounting system exactly once, with the VAT figures ready when the quarter closes.
In more detail
The model reads, the rules decide
The language model’s job is narrow: read a PDF and return the supplier, dates, amounts and VAT as structured data, with a confidence score. Everything after that is ordinary code: duplicate checks on the file itself, a check that the invoice is addressed to the right company, and a review queue for anything below the confidence threshold.
Nothing booked twice
Sending an invoice to the accounting system is guarded so that a retry, a re-run or two people clicking at once can’t book it twice. Every invoice ends up in exactly one state, and the register shows which.