Invoice handling shifted from manual entry to review of pre-filled Bills.
How we redesigned invoice-to-bill entry and automated only the repeatable parts for a financial services firm.
Tools used in process
The Situation
A financial services firm books client invoices in QuickBooks every week.
Bookkeepers receive supplier invoices by email, then enter them as Bills in each client's QuickBooks file. The volume was recurring, invoice formats varied, and the work was repetitive.
Daily
Processing cadence
~20
Invoices per run
2
Tools in play — Gmail & QuickBooks
The Complication
Every invoice followed the same manual steps.
Time
Manual entry consumed time that could be used for review.
Accuracy
Vendor names were not always consistent, increasing duplicate-risk points.
Throughput
When volume increased, the process became harder to manage through one manual queue.
The Approach
Map first. Then automate selectively.
Before building the workflow, we checked process maturity, mapped the as-is flow, assessed automation fit, and redesigned the process to remove waste and duplicate-risk points.
Assess maturity
Check whether the process is stable enough to automate, or whether it first needs clearer rules.
Map the as-is workflow
Document what actually happens today, using Miro and BPMN conventions.
Find waste and duplication
Identify repeated manual work, rework, duplicate-risk points, and unclear handoffs.
Separate task types
Split steps into rule-based work the system can handle, and judgement work that should stay human.
Redesign before building
Simplify the workflow first, then define how exceptions and approvals should move.
Automate selectively
Build only around repeatable, controlled steps, while keeping review and exceptions with the team.
The Question
Which steps actually need a human?
We mapped the as-is process in Miro using BPMN conventions, assessed each step using a simple automation opportunity framework, then separated the workflow into two categories: work the system can handle, and work that still needs human judgement.
Automate
Deterministic work
- Read invoice fields — vendor, date, amount, line items
- Look up the vendor in QuickBooks
- Create the vendor record if it's new
- Create the Bill & attach the source file
Keep human
Judgement work
- GL / cost-centre coding edge cases
- Ambiguous or new vendors that need review
- Final approval of the Bill in QuickBooks
- Anything that doesn't match the PO cleanly
The Build
How the new workflow handles invoice intake.
Gmail
watch inbox
Mindee
OCR extract
Tools
normalize
QuickBooks
find vendor
Path A · Vendor found
- 1. Iterate the line items
- 2. Create the Bill
- 3. Upload the invoice file
Path B · Vendor not found
- 1. Create the Vendor
- 2. Create the Bill
- 3. Upload the invoice file
One Router kept the workflow simple and reduced duplicate vendor creation risk. Human review remains at approval and exception points.
The Result
Less manual handling. More time for review.
The workflow does not remove the bookkeeper from the process. It shifts their starting point from manual entry to review and exception handling — they now start with a pre-filled Bill in QuickBooks, not a blank screen and a downloaded attachment.
~20
invoices prepared per daily run
tested first on a smaller batch
↓
less downloading and copy-paste
manual work reduced, not eliminated
Cleaner
vendor lookup and creation flow
fewer duplicate-risk points
✓
exceptions still route to a human
approval remains with the team
The Lesson
Don't automate the whole process. Start with the parts that are clearly repeatable.
The useful shift was separating judgement work from repeatable work. The repeatable work was invoice downloading, field extraction, vendor lookup, bill creation, and file attachment. Review, coding exceptions, approvals, and unclear cases stayed with the team.
Before automating a process, map it first. Then decide what should be automated, redesigned, or kept human.
Which repetitive task in your week could be redesigned before it gets automated?
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