All Projects
Finance

AI Invoice Processing & Approval Pipeline

Automated invoice extraction, validation, and approval routing that eliminated manual data entry and reduced processing time by 80%.

Processing time

80% faster

Tools
OCRGPT-4QuickBooksGoogle Sheetsn8n

The Client's Problem

My Approach

The Workflow Breakdown

1

Gmail polling every 30 minutes with attachment extraction for PDF, JPEG, and PNG invoices 2. GPT-4 Vision line-item extraction producing structured JSON with vendor, items, and totals 3. Automatic project matching by PO number, vendor name, or delivery address 4. QuickBooks chart-of-accounts categorization trained on 6 months of historical entries 5. Slack approval workflow for flagged invoices over $500 or unmatched to a project

Results & Impact

  • Bookkeeper hours on invoices dropped from 12 hours/week to under 1 hour (review only)
  • Categorization accuracy improved from ~88% (manual errors) to 99.1% automated
  • Invoice processing time went from 8-15 min per invoice to under 30 seconds
  • Miscategorized expenses went from $6,200 in one quarter to zero since deployment
  • Job cost report accuracy went from unreliable to real-time, matched to project
  • Monthly cost savings of $2,800 in redirected staff time

Technical Highlights