Supplier invoices approve themselves — humans just review.
More than 400 supplier invoices arrived every month as PDF attachments — each one printed, hand-keyed and walked to a partner's desk for sign-off. Approval took six days, and two errors a week were reaching the ledger.
Printed, hand-keyed, walked to a desk.
The firm's accounts-payable inbox filled with more than 400 supplier invoices every month, nearly all of them PDF attachments. Each one followed the same route: printed out, keyed by hand into the ledger, then carried across the office and left on a partner's desk to wait for sign-off.
The wait was the real cost. An invoice took six days to clear approval — not because anyone was slow, but because a paper document can only be in one place at a time, and a stack on a partner's desk is a queue nobody can see into. Whenever a partner was out or a deadline crunch hit, the stack simply grew, and the people waiting on it had no way to check where any given invoice stood.
Hand-keying carried its own tax. Retyping vendor names, amounts and line items from PDFs is exactly the kind of work where small slips creep in, and two errors a week were making it all the way into the ledger — an uncomfortable pattern for a firm whose entire business is getting other people's numbers right.
A pipeline where humans only review.
We rebuilt the whole journey inside Microsoft 365 — AI Builder reads each document, Power Automate moves it, Teams approves it and SharePoint files it. Four steps, in order.
AI Builder reads every incoming invoice PDF and pulls the vendor, the amount and the individual line items — the same fields staff used to hand-key, captured the moment the invoice arrives.
A Power Automate flow checks each extracted invoice against its purchase order, so a mismatch is flagged for review before the invoice goes anywhere near approval.
Routing rules send each invoice to the right level of sign-off based on its amount. For the partner, approval is one tap on a Teams notification — no printout, no desk, no pile.
Once approved, every invoice files itself into SharePoint — named, organized and searchable, with nothing left sitting in an inbox or a tray.
The same sign-off, without the paper.
Partners still review every approval — they just do it from Teams, on invoices that arrive already extracted, matched and filed.
The service behind this — and more like it.
Still walking paper to someone's desk?
Book a free 30-minute audit — we'll look at how invoices, approvals or any paper-bound process moves through your team today, and show you what Power Automate could take off your plate.