Finance and back office automation
Usually the largest single pool of recoverable hours in a business, and the only function where automation errors cost money directly rather than just time. Both facts shape how these builds are designed.
1. Supplier invoice capture and PO matching — $14,000 to $22,000
What happens now: invoices arrive as PDF attachments. Someone opens each one, reads the numbers, keys them into QuickBooks or Xero, codes them to a nominal account, and checks them against the purchase order.
What we build: invoices read on arrival, line items extracted, arithmetic self-checked, matched against the PO within your tolerance, coded and posted. Anything failing validation — price variance, missing PO, unknown supplier — lands in a review queue with the reason attached.
Realistic outcome: 75% to 90% auto-posted after a few months of tuning, not 100%. Anyone promising full straight-through processing has not met your suppliers. The full mechanics are in our step-by-step teardown, including the four decisions you have to make before anyone can build it.
2. Collections chasing — $8,000 to $12,000
What happens now: chasing happens when someone remembers, which means it happens inconsistently and least often when the team is busiest — exactly when cash matters most.
What we build: staged reminders on your ageing schedule, escalating to a human at a defined threshold, with payment status re-checked immediately before every send so nobody is chased for an invoice they already paid.
Highest return on this page, and not because of hours. Consistent chasing pulls collection forward, and the working-capital effect typically dwarfs the four to ten hours saved. If you only do one finance automation, we would usually argue for this one.
3. Expense processing — $9,000 to $14,000
What happens now: receipts photographed, emailed, chased, manually checked against policy, approved by forwarding, and keyed in.
What we build: receipt capture with OCR extraction, automatic policy checks, approval routing by amount and category, and posting to the ledger with the receipt attached.
Expense management is a well-served software category. If your requirements are ordinary, an off-the-shelf product at $8 per user per month will beat a custom build on both cost and features. We will tell you that on the call rather than quote you for it. A build makes sense when your policy logic is genuinely unusual or the product cannot reach your accounting system.
4. Order to invoice — $12,000 to $20,000
What happens now: a weekly export from the operational system, cleaned in Excel, imported into accounting. Invoices raised up to a week after the work completed.
What we build: completed jobs or shipped orders pulled continuously, transformations applied in code rather than in someone's Excel habits, and draft invoices created with the right references and attachments. Records failing validation queue for review with the reason attached.
The real gain: invoices raised the same day work completes. Cash collection moves forward by roughly a week, which is usually worth more than the labour.
5. Reconciliation preparation — $9,000 to $15,000
What happens now: bank lines matched against ledger entries by eye, with the unexplained residue investigated at month-end under time pressure.
What we build: automatic matching on reference, amount and date proximity, with confidence bands. High-confidence matches proposed for bulk approval; the genuinely ambiguous surfaced individually with candidate matches attached.
Note the framing — preparation, not reconciliation. The automation narrows thousands of lines to the handful needing judgement. A person still signs off. Finance automation that posts adjustments without review is the category we specifically warn against: high stakes, and no signal when it goes wrong.
6. Month-end reporting packs — $9,000 to $16,000
What happens now: several days of assembling the same pack from the same sources, with the numbers changing underneath you as late entries land.
What we build: the pack assembled from live figures on a schedule, with variance commentary prompts against budget and prior period, and a defined cut-off so the numbers stop moving. Delivered as a document your team reviews rather than one they build.
7. Payment run preparation — $8,000 to $14,000
What happens now: approved invoices assembled into a run by hand, bank details checked, the file built, and someone hoping nothing was missed.
What we build: the run assembled by due date and approval status, supplier bank details validated against the master record, duplicate payment detection across the run and recent history, and the file prepared for a human to review and release.
We prepare payment runs. We do not release them. Anything that moves money keeps a human approval step, and we will not build around that even if asked. The duplicate-detection step exists precisely because this is where an automation error is most expensive.
The design rule for finance work
Everywhere else, an automation that is right 95% of the time is a good automation. In finance it is a liability, because the 5% goes into a ledger that other things depend on and surfaces weeks later in an audit.
So finance builds are designed to be conservative rather than comprehensive: validate aggressively, hold anything uncertain, keep a human on anything that moves money, and make the review queue good enough that people actually use it. A build that auto-posts 80% cleanly and presents the rest well beats one that auto-posts 97% and gets 3% wrong.
What we would do first
Collections, then invoice capture. Collections is cheaper, faster to build, carries almost no downside risk, and the cash-flow effect is visible within a month. Invoice capture recovers more hours but is a bigger project with real accuracy requirements, and it goes better once the team has seen automation work.
Know how many hours invoicing costs you?
If not, that is the first thing an audit measures. Thirty-minute call to see whether it is worth doing.