Technologies Used
Overview
A professional services firm processing hundreds of vendor bills and quotations monthly faced a tedious, error-prone manual invoicing process. Staff spent hours transcribing information from various document formats (PDFs, images, scanned documents) into their invoicing system. The manual data entry led to frequent errors, delayed payments, and frustrated vendors. They needed an intelligent solution to extract structured data from diverse document formats and streamline invoice generation.
The Challenge
The firm received bills and quotations in wildly inconsistent formats—some were well-structured PDFs, others were poor-quality scans or photos taken on mobile devices. Each document had different layouts, fonts, and information structures. Manual data entry was slow and prone to errors in amounts, dates, and vendor details. These errors led to payment disputes, accounting reconciliation issues, and strained vendor relationships. The process created a bottleneck that delayed vendor payments and consumed significant staff time.
Our Solution
We built an intelligent invoice generation system using OpenAI's vision and language models to extract structured data from any document format. The system accepts uploads of bills and quotations as images or PDFs, uses AI to identify and extract key information (vendor details, line items, amounts, dates, tax information), structures the data into a standardized format, and presents it in an editable interface for review and confirmation. Staff can make corrections before final invoice generation, ensuring accuracy while dramatically reducing manual work. Built on C# .NET with SQL Server for robust data management and Azure hosting for scalability, the system handles high volumes while maintaining data security and compliance.
Results & Impact
- Substantially reduced invoice processing time per invoice
- Decreased data entry errors through AI-powered extraction and validation
- Improved vendor payment timelines, strengthening supplier relationships
- Enabled processing of significantly more invoices without additional staff
- Provided detailed audit trails and analytics on spending patterns and vendor performance