Invoice data to spreadsheet with AI

Many businesses I work with share a common problem.

Invoices and receipts come in from every direction. 

• Some are PDFs attached to emails. 
• Some are in the body of the email itself. 
• Some come from big suppliers with fancy accounting systems.
• Some are basically a photo of a handwritten docket.
• Some are just someone’s Word document with a logo stuck on top. 

If you’ve ever tried to track all of this properly – pulling out the totals, the dates, the supplier names, the GST – you’ll know it’s one of those jobs that either takes forever or doesn’t get done properly.

For years, I tried to automate this for clients, but it was basically impossible. The old tools needed everything in the same format to work reliably, but every invoice looked different. They’d constantly fail. I gave up trying.

What’s changed is AI. Specifically, AI that can analyse any invoice – regardless of how it’s formatted – and accurately extract the right information. Combined with an automation tool like Relay.app (affiliate link), which has a “human-in-the-loop” feature for a real person to review anything unusual before it gets processed, you can now set up a system where invoices land in your inbox and relevant data ends up in a spreadsheet automatically. Clean, consistent, and checked.

Is the setup work-intensive? Yes. It needs iteration – you test it, tweak it, test it again. It’s not an afternoon job. But once it’s running, it just runs. The time saved isn’t the five minutes on one email – it’s hours weekly, and errors disappear.

This is just the tip of the iceberg. The same idea – AI that can read messy, inconsistent real-world documents and extract useful data – opens up a whole stack of things that were basically impossible before:

• Purchase orders.
• Delivery dockets.
• Booking confirmations.
• Job sheets.
• Anything where you’ve been manually copying information from one place to another.

The best approach is through my Concierge Tech Support.

It’s a four-hour block where we sit down together over Zoom, have a proper look at how your business actually runs day-to-day, and determine what’s genuinely worth automating and what isn’t. (Not everything is, and I’ll be straight with you about that.) Once the stuff that is worth it is working, you wonder how you coped before.

Find out more about Concierge Tech Support here

If you’d prefer a lighter conversation, my $99 AI strategy session is still available, but I’m putting a cap on those shortly.

Book here if you want one while they’re still available.

P.S. If you’re still copying invoice information into a spreadsheet by hand – even occasionally – that’s exactly what I’m talking about. It doesn’t have to work that way anymore.