The bills
A building firm's accounts inbox has sixteen supplier bills from the week: timber, fixings, fuel cards and office supplies.
Supplier bills → approved for payment
Supplier bills
without the typing.
Every business pays suppliers, and most still type each bill into their accounts by hand. Altersoft builds workflows that read incoming bills, check them against what you ordered and prepare them for approval in your accounting software.
supplier-bills.flowIllustrative example
Before: Type every supplier bill into your accounts by handWith automation: Approve checked bills; look only at the mismatches
- Bills arrivePDFs and photos in the accounts inbox
- AI reads each oneSupplier, date, VAT and line items
- Matched to your ordersPrices and quantities checked against what you ordered
- One mismatch heldBilled 12 boxes, ordered 10: someone checks
- Approved in one clickMatched bills go into your accounts for payment
From inbox to accounts
Keep the approval.
Lose the data entry.
For any business that receives a steady stream of supplier bills by email: trades, wholesalers, hospitality, agencies and offices whose finance person spends hours keying in suppliers, dates, VAT and line items.
It works best with an accounts inbox and, where you use them, purchase orders or delivery notes to check against. Payments are never made automatically; a person approves every bill.
Collect the bills
Pick up bills from an agreed accounts inbox or supplier portal downloads, whether they are PDFs, scans or photos.
Read the details
Extract supplier, invoice number, dates, VAT, totals and line items, keeping the original attached to each draft.
Match and code
Check bills against purchase orders and delivery notes where you have them, and suggest the account code and VAT treatment from past bills.
Hold the mismatches
Different quantities or prices, duplicates, new bank details and unknown suppliers are held for a person, never passed for payment.
Approve in one place
Matched bills are drafted in your accounting software. A person approves them, and payment runs follow your normal process.
Illustrative example
Sixteen bills on a Monday.
One does not match the order.
Fictional scenario, not a customer case study or a live demonstration. Outcomes depend on your documents, data and systems.
The check
Fifteen match their purchase orders or past coding. One bills for 12 boxes of screws where the order and delivery note say 10, so it is held.
The decision
The office manager approves the fifteen in one go and queries the twelfth with the supplier. Nothing is paid until a person has approved it.
Systems & safeguards
Built around
your source of truth.
We assess access and data quality before promising a connection. These are integration options to scope, not ready-made connectors included in every project.
Email & supplier portals
Start with one accounts mailbox. Scans and photos need sample testing; anything unreadable goes to a person.
Xero, QuickBooks & Sage
Create draft bills through your accounting software's API where access allows, using your own suppliers, account codes and tracking categories.
Fraud checks & audit trail
Flag changed bank details and unfamiliar suppliers for extra checks, and record who approved each bill and what was changed.
Agree how your data is handled before connecting it
We scope who can access documents, which hosting and AI providers are used, retention and deletion, and what appears in logs. Use redacted samples for discovery. This page does not accept uploads or process any of your data.
Scope, delivery & pricing
Start with one
accounts inbox.
A fixed project quote follows a review of your inputs, systems and approval rules. The website's general starting price is not a price promise for this workflow.
Define a small pilot
Take a month of past bills and their purchase orders, and compare the drafts with what your team entered. Then run it alongside your normal process before relying on it.
What affects the cost?
Document variety, data quality, integration access, rule complexity, permissions and volume. We agree delivery dates after this assessment; system access and data cleanup can extend the work.
Make running costs explicit
The proposal should separate the build from hosting, AI usage, third-party licences, maintenance and future changes, specifying what is included and who owns each ongoing task.
Estimate the opportunity using your own numbers
For illustration only: 250 bills a month × 4 minutes less typing and checking each = about 17 hours of capacity. At an assumed £28 per hour, that is £470 of staff time before software costs and exception handling. It is not a measured result or a guaranteed saving; validate the assumptions in a pilot.
See our general pricing approach · Meet the engineer who builds it
Free first chat
How many bills
do you type in each month?
Tell us roughly how many supplier bills you receive, how they arrive and which accounting software you use. No real invoices needed for the first conversation.
Discuss your supplier billsOr call +44 7441 113592