Wholesale
Calder & Roe
Invoice processing, 40-branch wholesaler
Three-way matching ran on a shared inbox and occupied two people for most of a week. The agent clears the clean 92 percent. We priced the remainder before the board saw a business case, rather than after.
50
hours returned monthly
3.4
months to payback
92
percent accuracy
40
exceptions a month
Calder & Roe received about five hundred supplier invoices a month across forty branches. Three-way matching against purchase orders and goods-received notes happened in a shared inbox, and two people gave most of a week to it every month. We were asked whether automating it would pay for itself.
What was agreed before building
The proposed agent extracts line items, matches them against the purchase order and posts the clean ones. Anything where the line total disagrees beyond a set tolerance, or where the supplier is new, goes to a person. We required that confidence floor to be agreed before any code was written.
What it actually cost
Ninety-two percent clear automatically. The remaining forty a month still reach a person, and they take longer than the original task because someone is now checking the agent’s working. Priced in, payback moved from 2.9 months to 3.4. Bexley signed on the 3.4.