Timeline
10 weeks
Team
4 engineers + 1 PM
Client Stage
Growth-stage Manufacturing
The Problem
Finance teams spent hours manually processing invoices — extracting line items, validating against ERP data, and reconciling totals. The process was error-prone, slow, and consistently delayed month-end close cycles.
Our Approach
Process Mapping (Week 1–2)
Shadowed the finance team through a full month-end close to map every manual step. Catalogued the 14 invoice formats in circulation and the ERP fields each needed to land in.
Document Intelligence Pipeline (Week 3–5)
Built ingestion and extraction on Azure Document Intelligence with custom-trained models for the client's vendor invoice formats. Added a verification layer using Azure OpenAI to catch edge cases the layout models missed.
ERP Integration & Reasoning (Week 6–8)
Integrated bidirectional sync with the client's ERP. Added AI reasoning for 3-way PO matching, tax calculation validation, and currency conversion checks before any record was written back.
Chat Interface & Rollout (Week 9–10)
Shipped a conversational query layer so finance users could ask 'Show me all unreconciled invoices over $50K from Q3' in plain English. Rolled out to the AP team with a 2-week supervised period.
The Solution
We built an AI-powered document processing platform using Azure Document Intelligence and Azure OpenAI to extract, validate, and reason over financial data. A natural-language chat interface lets finance teams query invoices conversationally, and automated ERP cross-checking eliminated manual reconciliation.
Why This Tech Stack
Azure Document Intelligence was the fastest path to production-grade extraction without us training OCR models from scratch. Azure OpenAI's function calling made ERP tool-use deterministic and auditable — critical for finance workflows where every write-back is traceable.
The Outcome
Reduced invoice processing time from hours to seconds. Month-end close cycles accelerated significantly, and the finance team recovered capacity previously lost to manual data entry — now redirected to higher-value analysis.
Key Metrics
4 hrs → 12 sec
Avg. invoice processing time
98.5%
Extraction accuracy
6 days → 2 days
Month-end close acceleration
~60%
Finance team capacity recovered