Accounts-payable invoice intake, matching, and approval

I'm running a food manufacturing/distribution business. We have an old custom ERP system which works well for us and I don't plan on changing it. My admin assistant spends at least 50% of her time inputing invoices and client orders in the ERP. She's becoming a bottleneck as we're growing and given a lot of her work is data entry, I'm sure there's a solution even though there's a lot of resistance to change in our small team. My ERP doesn't have an API, too old. It lives on a Windows 2012 physical server which we access remotely. Any ideas or people having experience successfully automating tasks with similar setup? Thanks in advance! Read more

I dropped off a batch of invoices recently and sat with my accountant while she was catching up on them. What surprised me wasn't the accounting part. It was watching her: open the invoice look at the PDF or paper copy then manually type the vendor, totals, VAT, invoice number etc. into her system one line at a time. Over and over. And I realized: I'm paying good professional money for highly skilled financial work... but a chunk of the time is still being spent retyping data from one screen into another. Maybe I'm naive here, but I genuinely expected this process to be more automated by now. Is this still normal for most small businesses/bookkeepers? And if so, what's the reason it hasn't really disappeared yet? Read more

I'm helping a friend's logistics company optimize their workflow, and I'm shocked by how much manual work they still do. They receive about 50 supplier invoices (PDFs) a week, and the admin literally types the line items (price, quantity, SKU) into a giant Excel sheet manually. It takes her like 4 hours every Friday. I asked why they don't use automation, and they said existing tools are either too expensive (Enterprise level) or too complex to set up. Question for business owners/admins here: Is this manual typing still common? Or are they just behind the times? What is your current workflow for getting data out of PDFs? Do you just hire a VA, or is there a simple tool I'm missing? Thanks for saving my sanity.

I'm a developer and a client asked me to build something to "process invoices automatically." I assumed they meant extract data (vendor name, amount, date, etc.) but when I dug deeper, I'm not sure that's actually their pain point. When I asked "what happens after you extract the data?" they mentioned matching to POs, getting approvals, entering into accounting system, checking for duplicates, etc. It seems like extraction is maybe 20% of the work? Help me understand: For those who process invoices regularly - where does the actual time/pain come from? If I gave you perfect data extraction tomorrow (100% accurate OCR), what would still be manual/painful? What's the scenario that causes the most problems? (I'm guessing things like: duplicate payments, wrong approvals, missed invoices, reconciliation nightmares?) I want to build something useful, but I feel like I'm solving the wrong problem. Any insights from people in the trenches would be super helpful.