30
Invoices processed per day
50%
Reduction in verification effort
4%
Error rate caught and flagged
1
Queue — flagged items only
The problem

30 invoices. Every day. Every one checked by hand.

The system

Extract. Validate. Flag. Touch only what fails.

Three stages. Clear invoices pass straight to the payment queue; only failures reach a human.

  1. Stage 1

    OCR & extraction

    Invoices arriving by email are processed through an OCR pipeline. Vendor name, GST number, PAN number, invoice date, line items, totals, and work order reference are extracted and normalised into structured fields — ready for validation. No manual data entry.

    Next: structured fields pass to the rules engine.

  2. Stage 2

    Rules engine

    GST and PAN numbers are validated against format rules and cross-referenced with the approved vendor register. Work order references are fuzzy-matched against open purchase orders — handling differences like "WO-2024/1234" vs "WO2024-1234". Line items are checked against approved rate cards and totals reconciled.

    Passes: clear invoices go directly to the payment queue. Triggers Stage 3: any failed check.

  3. Stage 3

    Human review

    Invoices that fail any check are flagged with a specific reason — wrong GST number, unmatched work order, rate card deviation — and queued for review. The accounts team opens the day with a short list of items that actually need attention, not a full batch of 30.

    Volume: ~4% of invoices flagged — the rest clear without human touch.

The outcome

Before and after at 30 invoices/day.

Metric Before After
Daily verification time 1.5–2 hours — full batch, every invoice ~45 minutes — flagged items only
Effort reduction 50% of daily verification time recovered
Error catch rate Variable — fatigue-dependent, ~1–2 slip-throughs per day 4% flagged — consistent, end-to-end
Human review scope All 30 invoices Flagged invoices only — with reason attached
Correction cycles ~1–2 per day (vendor calls, credit notes, reconciliation) Near zero — caught before payment
End-of-batch accuracy Lower — attention degraded across the batch Consistent — validation rules don't fatigue
The design principle

Software handles the volume. Humans handle the ambiguity.

"Software handles the volume. Humans handle the ambiguity."

The system doesn't replace human judgement — it focuses it. Accounts staff still review every flagged invoice. Their skill is applied where it matters: on the 4% that have genuine problems.

Humans are poor at sustained, repetitive verification. Attention drifts, patterns stop registering, small discrepancies get missed — especially at the end of a long batch. Software doesn't fatigue. The 50% effort saving came not from working faster but from eliminating the 96% of the task that should never have been human work in the first place.

Applied to

Same pipeline. Different suppliers.

See what this looks like in your business.

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