From 3 Hours to 15 Minutes per Day

The challenge

The admin team was spending 3 hours daily manually processing and importing incoming invoices into their ERP system. Errors, delays and frustration were a daily reality.

Our approach

We built an automated invoice processing pipeline that reads, validates and imports PDF invoices into the ERP automatically. Exceptions are flagged for human review.

1. Week 1

   Mapping the invoice flow

   For a full week we tracked every incoming invoice: which channel it arrived through, who touched it and where it stalled. That revealed the real bottleneck was not the data entry itself but locating the matching purchase order.

2. Week 2

   Extraction and purchase-order matching

   The OCR layer extracts supplier name, invoice number, amounts and VAT. The pipeline then matches each invoice automatically against the open purchase order in the ERP, including checks on price and quantity deviations.

3. Week 3

   Keeping exceptions deliberately human

   Not every invoice should pass automatically. Deviations above a configured threshold, unknown suppliers and duplicate invoice numbers land in a separate review queue. The accountant decides, the system executes.

4. Week 4

   Training and handover

   Two short sessions with the administration team, a one-page decision tree for edge cases, and a month of aftercare during which we reviewed the first exceptions together and tuned the thresholds.

The results

• 90% reduction in invoice processing time
• €42,000 in annual personnel cost savings
• Error rate dropped from 8% to < 0.5%
• Payback period: 4 months

Frequently asked questions

Does this work with suppliers who do not send structured e-invoices?

Yes. Most SME suppliers send ordinary PDF invoices, and those are exactly the difficult ones. The OCR layer reads them too; the recognition pattern is tuned once per supplier, after which it stays stable.

What happens if the system misreads an invoice?

Deviations above the configured threshold never pass automatically but land in a review queue. In practice that is a handful of invoices per week instead of every invoice.

Which ERP does this work with?

The pipeline connects via API or file exchange. This project involved an existing ERP package; the same principle works with Exact, Odoo, Teamleader or a custom package with an API.

What is the payback period?

Four months in this case. It depends mainly on invoice volume: from roughly 200 incoming invoices per month, automation usually becomes profitable quickly.