Your Fuse Logo

Tool of the week

You think: “If I touch it I’ll break it.”

Invoices without typing

The moment

The invoice comes in by email. Somebody opens it, reads the vendor, the date, the total, the PO number if there is one, types it into the accounting software, attaches the PDF, and sends it to the owner to approve. Then does the next one.

The cost

Three minutes each at best. Fifty invoices a week is two and a half hours of typing numbers that are already typed. And the duplicate, the one that got emailed twice, gets paid twice about once a quarter.

The rule. Write this first.

Nothing gets paid without a person clicking approve. Anything that matches an existing vendor, amount and date within seven days is held as a possible duplicate.

The reading part is solved. A model reads a PDF invoice and pulls the vendor, the date, the line items and the total better than a tired human at 4pm. What is not solved by the tool is the rule. The tool reads and codes. The person approves. That is the whole design.

The five-minute version.

The sheet is the queue. The approve column is the person. Duplicates wait in the sheet until a person says otherwise.

  1. 1Write the rule above at the top of a note. The approve step is not optional and never will be.
  2. 2Make a sheet with these columns: received, vendor, invoice date, invoice number, PO, total, duplicate?, status, approved by.
  3. 3In your mail, make a filter: any message from a vendor with a PDF gets the label Invoices.
  4. 4For each Invoices message, paste the invoice text (or attach the PDF) into the prompt below and add the row it returns to the sheet.
  5. 5Before approving, look at the duplicate column. Status moves from New to Approved only when a person changes it. Pay from Approved rows only.

The prompt

Paste it as written. The parts in double braces are yours to fill in.

Read this invoice: {{invoice text or PDF}}. Return one line with these fields separated by tabs: vendor, invoice date (YYYY-MM-DD), invoice number, PO number or NONE, total as a number. Then compare against these recent rows: {{last 30 days of vendor, total, date}}. If the same vendor and total appear within seven days, add the word DUPLICATE at the end. Return nothing else.

Next week’s tool.

One a week, Thursdays, by email. Say which pile is yours.

Watch one built live.

Two hours, one owner’s real problem built in front of the room, the templates to take home.

The workshop