Invoice intake

What this problem is

Invoice intake is the work of receiving a supplier bill — PDF, email, portal, or paper — and turning it into a trusted record in finance. It sits before approval and payment. If intake is messy, every later step inherits the mess.

Is this your problem?

• Invoices arrive in several inboxes and get forwarded as attachments
• Someone re-types supplier, amount, VAT, and due date into the accounting tool
• Duplicates are caught late, sometimes after payment
• Missing purchase orders or cost codes only appear when the bookkeeper chases
• Month-end is delayed because nobody knows what is still sitting in email

Current workflow

A typical small finance team receives invoices by email, as PDFs in a shared drive, and occasionally on paper. A bookkeeper opens each file, keys fields into Xero, QuickBooks, or similar, matches a supplier, and parks exceptions in a folder or a mental list. Urgent bills jump the queue. Everything else waits until there is a quiet afternoon.

Where it fails

• No single intake address, so invoices live wherever the supplier last emailed a person
• Manual keying introduces amount and VAT errors that reconciliation has to find later
• There is no duplicate check until payment run
• Exceptions have no owner or age — they sit in a “query” pile
• The accounting system is updated after the fact, so operational staff cannot see status

How to measure the baseline

For two weeks, count invoices received, minutes from receipt to a complete draft record, how many required re-keying, how many were duplicates or missing data, and hours spent on exceptions. Use cases_per_week, minutes_per_case, error_rate_pct, straight_through_rate_pct, and exception_rate_pct. Prefer observed timestamps from email and the ledger over estimates.

Metrics that matter

• Cases per week — Volume of discrete items (leads, invoices, tickets) in a typical week. (cases/week)
• Minutes per case — Average handling time from pickup to completion of one case. (minutes)
• Error rate — Share of cases that contain a defect requiring correction. (%)
• Straight-through rate — Share of cases completed without exception handling. (%)
• Exception rate — Share of cases routed to human exception handling. (%)
• Human hours per week — Total staff time spent on this workflow in a typical week. (hours/week)

Root causes

• Suppliers send bills to individuals, not a governed address
• The team does not have a written definition of a complete invoice record
• Purchase-order matching is optional in practice even when it is required in policy
• The accounting tool is treated as a filing cabinet rather than a workflow
• VAT and coding knowledge sits with one person

What should be automated

• A single intake mailbox or drop-zone that creates a case for every file
• Extraction of supplier, dates, totals, and VAT into a draft record
• Duplicate detection against recent bills for the same supplier and amount
• Lookup of supplier and nominal codes the team already trusts
• A queue of exceptions with age, not a shared inbox thread

What should remain human-controlled

• Approving the draft when extraction is uncertain
• Coding new suppliers and unusual cost centres
• VAT treatment on edge cases
• Anything that would post to the ledger without a review threshold
• Disputes and credit notes that change commercial terms

Example intervention architecture

Illustrative only — not a client result. Invoices land in one mailbox. Files are stored with an audit trail. Extraction proposes fields; a rules layer checks totals, VAT arithmetic, and duplicates. High-confidence drafts can wait for a daily human batch review. Low-confidence or new-supplier bills stop for a person. Write-back to the accounting system happens only after the agreed control. Email is no longer the system of record.

Failure modes

• Posting extracted figures without a human control on material amounts
• Extraction that looks confident and is wrong on VAT
• Suppliers ignored because their format was never tested
• Duplicate payments if matching is only on filename
• A backlog that still lives in email because people bypass the queue

When not to automate

• You receive a small number of simple bills and one person already processes them the same day
• There is no accounting system with a usable API or import, only a desktop file
• The chart of accounts and supplier list are too unstable to match against
• Invoices are mostly handwritten or too inconsistent for extraction to beat typing
• Nobody will review exceptions — automation without an owner creates silent errors

Related problems

• Document processing

Sources

• Making Tax Digital (GOV.UK)
• VAT guide (HMRC)