The problem
Invoices arrived three ways — email, supplier portal, and paper scan — and matching them against purchase orders was a full-time job shared across the office. Month-end meant late nights; duplicates slipped through quarterly. Four staff-days a week went to work no one was hired to do.
The work
We built an ingestion pipeline that reads all three arrival routes into one queue, a matching engine tuned to the firm's actual supplier quirks, and an exception lane so that anything genuinely ambiguous reaches a human with full context attached. The scope was written down in week one, with the price on it.
Working software shipped in week two — the office watched the first hundred invoices reconcile themselves before agreeing to the rest.
The result
Reconciliation now runs while the office sleeps. Staff see only the roughly three percent of documents that need judgment, and the four staff-days became forty minutes of review. The duplicate that used to slip through quarterly has not survived a single night since.