Email Invoice Capture to Records & a Finance Dashboard
Supplier invoices arriving by email are now read, recorded, and pushed to a live dashboard automatically. Finance and other teams stopped re-keying attachments by hand.
- Duration
- 6 weeks
- Services
- Workflow AutomationAI IntegrationAPI Integration
A distribution business received hundreds of supplier and partner invoices as email attachments every week. A finance clerk opened each one, typed the vendor, amount, due date, and reference into a spreadsheet, then re-entered the same data into the accounting system. Other teams, procurement and operations, kept asking finance for numbers that were always a few days stale.
Challenges
- Invoices arrived as mixed PDFs, images, and scans with no common layout.
- The same data was typed twice: once into a spreadsheet, once into accounting.
- Due dates were missed because nothing tracked them until month-end.
- Every team needed the same figures, but only finance could produce them.
Objectives
- Capture invoice data straight from the inbox, with no manual typing.
- Record each invoice once, into both the ledger and a shared store.
- Give finance and other teams a live dashboard instead of a spreadsheet.
- Flag anything the system is unsure about for a quick human check.
We built an automation that watches a dedicated finance mailbox, extracts fields from each attachment with a document-AI step, and writes a normalized record. Confident invoices post to the accounting system and appear on a shared finance dashboard; anything low-confidence or duplicated lands in a review queue with the source attachment side by side. Other teams get read-only views scoped to what they need.
Implementation
- 01Field & mailbox mapping
One week defining the exact fields each team needs and auditing a month of real invoices for the layouts the extractor must handle.
- 02Extraction & normalization
A document-AI step reads each attachment; results are normalized against a vendor master, with confidence scores driving the review queue.
- 03Recording & dashboard
Idempotent posting to the accounting API plus a live dashboard for finance, with scoped read-only views for procurement and operations.
- 04Parallel run & cutover
Two weeks running alongside the manual process to calibrate extraction accuracy, then retiring the spreadsheet.
Architecture overview
- n8n watching a dedicated finance mailbox
- Document-AI extraction with per-field confidence scoring
- PostgreSQL as the invoice store and vendor master
- Accounting-system API for idempotent posting
- Next.js dashboard with role-scoped, read-only team views
What changed for the business.
- Invoice entry time cut from minutes each to seconds of review.
- Double data entry between spreadsheet and accounting eliminated.
- Due dates surfaced on the dashboard instead of discovered late.
- Procurement and operations self-serve the numbers they used to request.
Lessons learned
- Extraction confidence, not a yes/no, is what makes an invoice pipeline safe. Route the unsure ones to a human.
- A shared dashboard removed more work than the automation itself, because it killed the internal requests for figures.
- Recording once, then fanning out to views, ended the disagreements about which number was right.
Facing a similar problem?
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