A stack of supplier invoices arrives — PDFs, photos of paper bills, a few emails — and someone on the accounts team retypes each one into the books: vendor name, invoice number, amount, tax, due date. It is careful work, and it is also the kind of work that a tired afternoon turns into a wrong digit that takes an hour to trace later.
Signs this is worth fixing
- The same accounts person spends part of every day just typing invoice details into the system.
- Mismatches between the invoice and the purchase order are caught late, sometimes after payment.
- You cannot say, without checking, how many supplier invoices are still unpaid this week.
- GSTIN or amount typos on entered invoices cause GST return mismatches later.
What a good system does
It should read a supplier's invoice — whether it is a clean PDF or a photo of a paper bill — and pull out the vendor, amount, tax, invoice number and due date correctly, then match it against the purchase order and flag anything that does not line up. A person should always check and approve before it posts, especially the first time a new vendor's invoice format comes through. It should not just extract text; it should place that text correctly into your ledger, ready for the accounts team to approve.
What it costs you
The setup cost is teaching the system your common vendors' invoice formats, which takes some initial checking before it runs smoothly. After that, the accounts team's job shifts from typing to checking — faster, and with fewer typing errors reaching your books. It will not remove the need for a person to look at anything unusual; it should not try to.
Questions to ask any vendor
- Does a person always approve before anything posts to my ledger, or does it post on its own?
- How does it handle a messy scanned invoice, not just a clean PDF?
- Can it match an invoice against my purchase order and flag a mismatch?
- Where does my invoice data live, and can I get it out if I switch systems?
How we can help
Kanakku reads supplier and bank statements, matches payments to invoices, and drafts the entries for you to check and approve — posted through a proper double-entry ledger so your reports always add up. Tell us how many supplier invoices you process a month at talk to us and we will show you Kanakku on a real batch.
