Invoices that arrive by email are sometimes retyped into an accounting system

What it looks like

A supplier sends an invoice as an email attachment. Somebody opens it, reads the numbers off the document, and types them into an accounting system: vendor, date, invoice number, amount, and usually an account code or a job. Then the email is filed, or it is not, and the next one is opened.

It may not be an actual job assigned to someone. It happens between the real work, usually in a block of time on Friday afternoon or in the evening after everyone has gone home.

What it costs

The arithmetic is simple. Twenty invoices a week at three minutes each is an hour. Nobody schedules that hour, so nobody sees it. That is an illustration of the multiplication, not a finding about any business.

The larger cost is timing. When bills are entered in batches, the picture of what the business owes is always slightly out of date. Discounts for paying early are missed quietly, because the invoice was not in the system while the window was open. Cash planning runs on a figure that leaves out whatever is still sitting in an inbox, which tends to be the most recent and largest arrivals. See Why the delay itself costs money.

Where it goes wrong

• The same bill lands twice. A vendor resends, or it arrives once to the office and once to the owner. Duplicate payments are found later, if at all.
• The reading is confident and wrong. A transposed digit looks exactly like a real invoice number. It surfaces months later as a payment that cannot be matched.
• The coding is a decision, not a lookup. Which account or job a bill belongs to is often a judgment made from memory, or is written down nowhere.
• The filing is separate from the entry. Proving what was billed means searching old mail instead of opening a record.

What a better version looks like

The invoice is recorded immediately when it arrives instead of on Friday, and what is on it becomes a record, marked so the same bill cannot land twice.

Two things matter more than the automation. Uncertainty is visible: anything the reading was unsure of is flagged, and a guessed field looks different from one read cleanly. And nothing is overwritten: the system reports differences for a person to rule on instead of correcting records on its own.

Questions worth asking about your own operation

• How many invoices arrive in a week, and how long does each take?
• On any given Tuesday, how much of what is owed is not yet in the system?
• If a digit were transposed today, what would catch it?
• Who knows how each supplier's bills are coded, and is it written down?