Payment advices matched to invoices, posted only on approval

The problem

The client is an instrumentation manufacturer in Pune. Its customers email payment advices — the note that says which invoices a payment covers. Finance has to read each one, match it against the open invoices in the company's desktop accounting system, and record the payment by hand.

The friction

The advice arrives as an attachment or as text in an email body, in whatever layout the customer's own system produces. Somebody reads it, finds the bill numbers, looks each one up, and types the result into the ledger. It is careful work, it is entirely repetitive, and it happens every day.

The system

As scoped, the system will read payment advices from the company's mailboxes, extract the fields that matter, and match them against open invoices by bill number. Posting to the ledger happens only after a person approves the match.

That approval step is the design rather than a precaution added to it. Money moving against the wrong invoice is expensive to unpick, and an extraction that is right most of the time is not an argument for removing the person who checks.

The workflow

Extraction and matching are the system's work. The posting decision stays with finance, who see what the system read, what it matched it to, and what it proposes to record.

What we learned

This engagement is scoped and under way; nothing described above is running yet, and this page will be rewritten as the work is delivered rather than in advance of it.

The shape of the problem is already familiar, though. Reading a document and finding the reference numbers is repetition. Deciding that a payment really does settle a particular invoice is judgement. The line between them is where the approval gate goes.