Case study / Construction & distribution / Workflow Automation
Fourteen hundred supplier invoices a month, 94% of them processed without a human touch.
An accounts-payable team of three was keying every supplier invoice by hand and missing early-payment discounts. AI extraction, purchase-order matching, and approval routing now clear most invoices in under two minutes.
- Industry
- Construction & distribution
- Client
- Builders' merchant with 6 branches
- Scale
- £28m revenue · 3-person AP team · ~1,400 invoices per month
- Timeline
- 6 weeks from discovery to full volume
- Solution
- Workflow Automation
11 min → 90 sec
handling time per invoice
94%
straight-through processing
−88%
late-payment penalties
6 → 2 days
month-end close
01 / The challenge
Where the time was going.
Invoices arrived by email, post, and supplier portals in every conceivable format. Each one was printed, checked against a purchase order, keyed into the accounting system, and walked to a branch manager for sign-off. Errors surfaced weeks later as supplier disputes.
- 01Roughly 260 hours a month of manual keying and chasing
- 02Duplicate payments discovered during audit, and early-payment discounts routinely missed
- 03Approvals bottlenecked on six branch managers who were rarely at a desk
- 04Month-end close stretched to six working days
- 05No single view of what was owed, approved, or disputed
02 / The solution
How the workflow runs.
We built an intake-to-posting pipeline that reads every invoice, matches it, and only asks a person for a decision when something genuinely needs judgement.
- I
Capture from every channel
A shared AP mailbox, scanned post, and portal downloads all land in one queue. Duplicates are detected on supplier, number, and amount before anything else happens.
- II
Extract and normalise
Document AI pulls header and line-item data, including multi-page invoices and credit notes, and maps supplier references to the master data.
- III
Three-way match
Each line is matched to the purchase order and goods-received note. Quantity or price variances within tolerance are auto-accepted; anything else is flagged with the reason.
- IV
Route exceptions to a person
Branch managers approve or query exceptions from a Microsoft Teams card on their phone. The decision and comment are written back to the audit trail.
- V
Post and schedule payment
Approved invoices are posted to the accounting system with the correct coding, and payment runs are timed to capture early-settlement discounts.
Human-led by design
Guardrails that kept people in control
- Any invoice above £10,000 or from a new supplier always requires human approval.
- Bank-detail changes on a supplier record trigger a verification call before payment.
- Every automated decision is logged with the extracted data, match result, and confidence score.
- Finance can pause the pipeline or revert any posting from a single dashboard.
Stack
- Microsoft 365 mailbox
- Azure Document Intelligence
- Anthropic Claude for line-item reasoning
- Sage 200 API
- Microsoft Teams approvals
- Power BI
Timeline
- Week 1
Discovery
Sampled 400 invoices, categorised formats, and agreed tolerance rules with finance.
- Weeks 2–4
Build
Extraction, matching, and approval flows built and tested against three months of historical invoices.
- Week 5
Parallel run
Automation ran alongside the manual process; results compared daily and rules tuned.
- Week 6
Cutover
Manual keying stopped. Weekly exception review with the AP lead continues.
03 / The results
Before and after.
Measured over the 90 days after go-live against the 90 days before. Figures are rounded and client details anonymised.
| Measure | Before | After |
|---|---|---|
| Handling time per invoice | 11 minutes | 90 seconds |
| Invoices needing manual touch | 100% | 6% |
| Approval turnaround | 3.2 days | 5 hours |
| Late-payment penalties per quarter | £4,100 | £490 |
| Month-end close | 6 working days | 2 working days |
What the team noticed
- The AP team moved from data entry to supplier relationships and cash-flow planning.
- Branch managers approve from their phones in seconds instead of signing paper at the end of the week.
- The finance director has a live view of committed spend by branch for the first time.
What comes next
- Supplier statement reconciliation using the same matching engine
- Automated expense claims for site staff
- Cash-flow forecasting from committed purchase orders
Want this for your business?
We start with one workflow, measure it properly, and expand only when the numbers say so.