Invoice and bill entry
Supplier invoices arrive as PDFs and phone photos. Someone opens each one and types it into QuickBooks or Xero. We take away the typing and leave the decisions with your team.
- Worth automating when
- About 40 or more bills a month, or someone spending 3 or more hours a week keying them in.
- Works with
- QuickBooks Online, Xero, Dext, Hubdoc, Gmail, Outlook, shared drives, and most tools with an export or a connection.
- Who checks the exceptions
- Your bookkeeper or office manager, for anything new, unusual or over your limit
- Price
- from $3,500 fixed, quoted before we start. Optional upkeep from $350 a month.
How it runs
Bills arrive in one place
Suppliers email a dedicated address, or we pick bills up from Dext, Hubdoc or a shared folder you already use.
Each bill is read
Supplier, date, invoice number, line items and tax, including GST/HST, PST and QST in Canada or sales tax in the US.
Each bill is checked
Is it a duplicate? Does the supplier match one you know? Do the lines add up to the total? Does it match the purchase order?
Routine bills are drafted
Coded to the account and tax code you used last time for that supplier, then created as a draft bill with the PDF attached.
The rest wait for a person
New suppliers, anything that didn't check out and anything over your dollar limit go to a short approval list, each with the reason.
A worked example
A typical setup, to show how the pieces fit. Not a client story.
A 15-person landscaping company
Today: About 220 bills a month from 40 suppliers, most of them the same dozen every month. The office manager keys them in on Tuesday and Friday afternoons.
After: The regular suppliers are drafted automatically. About 25 a month are new, odd or over $2,000, and those wait for the office manager's approval.
| Measure | Before | After |
|---|---|---|
| Time keying bills | 6 hrs/wk | 45 min/wk |
| Bills a person touches | 220/mo | about 25/mo |
Questions about invoice and bill entry
- What about handwritten or photographed receipts?
- Those are read too. When a field can't be read confidently, the bill is flagged for a person rather than guessed at.
- Does it handle Canadian sales taxes?
- Yes. GST/HST, PST and QST are split the way the invoice shows them, and a bill is flagged when the tax doesn't match the supplier's province.
- Do we need Dext or Hubdoc?
- No. If you already use one, we build on it rather than replace it. If you don't, bills can come straight from email.
Have a chore like this?
Book a free 20-minute call. We'll tell you whether it's worth automating and roughly what it would cost. If it isn't worth it, we'll say so.
Pick a time