Supplier invoices matched without a data-entry team

The challenge

Invoices from more than a thousand suppliers arrived in every conceivable format. A contracted team keyed them in and matched them against purchase orders and receipts, and month-end close depended on that team's throughput.

The approach

1. 01

   Extracted line items with a schema that rejects partially parsed invoices.

2. 02

   Matched against purchase orders and goods-received notes with a tolerance band.

3. 03

   Escalated only discrepancies outside tolerance, with both documents side by side.

4. 04

   Tracked supplier-level error rates to fix the causes rather than the symptoms.

The outcome

Close no longer waits on data entry. The supplier error-rate report turned out to be the more valuable output — a handful of suppliers accounted for most of the exceptions.