A New Zealand logistics company’s finance team was manually keying 800+ supplier invoices a month — a three-day cycle with frequent errors and growing compliance risk. Avtrix built an AI document-processing pipeline that reads, validates and posts invoices into Xero automatically. Manual effort fell by 95%, the end-to-end cycle dropped from three days to two hours, and every invoice now has a complete audit trail.
The Client and the Challenge
The client runs freight and transport operations with hundreds of suppliers — fuel, subcontracted carriers, tyres, servicing, tolls and port charges. Invoices arrived by email as PDFs, scans and occasional photos, in as many layouts as there were suppliers.
Each month the finance team opened, read, coded and keyed more than 800 of them into Xero, matched them against purchase orders and dockets, and chased the missing ones. The monthly cycle took three working days of the team’s time; duplicate payments and wrong GST coding were common; and the audit trail was a shared inbox. As the fleet grew, the problem was growing with it.
What We Built
Avtrix designed an automated document-processing pipeline that removes the keying entirely and leaves people to handle only the exceptions.
- Capture. A dedicated inbox and supplier portal collect every invoice as it arrives.
- Read. OCR combined with a document-AI model extracts supplier, invoice number, date, line items, GST and totals from any layout — no per-supplier templates.
- Validate. A custom workflow engine checks each invoice against the purchase order, the delivery docket, the supplier master and duplicate-detection rules, and flags GST anomalies.
- Post. Clean invoices are coded and posted to Xero via the API with the source document attached; exceptions (typically 5–10%) go to a person with the reason highlighted.
- Audit. Every step — what was read, what was checked, who approved — is logged against the invoice.
Python Azure Xero API OCR / Document AI Custom workflow engine
How We Delivered It
Discovery
Mapped the current process end to end and sampled 300 real invoices across all supplier types to understand the variety.
Scope & fixed price
Agreed the validation rules, the exception categories and the success metric — cycle time and manual hours — at a fixed price.
Build & test on real invoices
The pipeline ran in parallel with the manual process for a full month; every disagreement was reviewed and the rules tightened.
Cut-over & support
Switched to automated posting once accuracy was proven, with the finance team trained on the exception queue and 60 days of support.
Results Delivered
95% reduction in manual effort
The team touches only the exceptions. Roughly 50 hours a month of keying and checking became a few hours of review.
Cycle time from 3 days to 2 hours
Invoices are in Xero, coded and matched, the same day they arrive — which also unlocked early-payment terms with key suppliers.
100% audit-trail compliance
Every invoice carries its source document, extracted data, validation results and approver, ready for the accountant and the auditor.
Fewer errors, fewer duplicates
Duplicate detection and GST checks now run on every invoice, not just the ones someone happened to notice.
What This Means for Your Business
If your team is re-keying documents — supplier invoices, delivery dockets, application forms, purchase orders — you are paying for software in wages. Industry benchmarks put a manually processed invoice at US$12–30 against US$2–5 automated; we set out the maths in the true cost of manual data entry. Document automation is usually a four-to-eight-week, fixed-price project, and it pays for itself within months for any business handling a few hundred documents a month.
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Client details are anonymised for confidentiality. Figures are as reported by the client after go-live. Delivered by Avtrix Software Solutions Limited, Taupō — serving businesses across New Zealand.