Giving an independent retailer 12 hours a week back from bookkeeping
A two-site homeware retailer near Islington was drowning in supplier invoices, till reconciliation, and a month-end close that ate a working week. We automated invoice capture, matching, and reconciliation into their accounting software — no accountant hours added.
The problem
Two shops, forty-plus suppliers, invoices arriving as emails, PDFs, and paper slips in delivery boxes. The owner typed them into Xero by hand, matched them against statements at month-end, and reconciled two tills against the bank manually. Between her and the store manager, the admin burned roughly 12 hours every week — and the month-end close regularly took five days.
She didn’t need new accounting software. She needed the manual steps between the real world and Xero to disappear.
What we built
Supplier invoices — emailed, photographed, or forwarded — now flow into an AI extraction pipeline that reads them, codes them to the right account and location, and posts them to Xero as drafts. Anything ambiguous gets flagged for a one-tap approval on the owner’s phone instead of silently guessing.
Daily till exports from both sites reconcile automatically against the bank feed, and supplier statements are matched against captured invoices so month-end is a review, not an archaeology dig.
- Email-in and photo-in invoice capture with AI extraction
- Automatic account and location coding, with confidence thresholds
- One-tap approval queue on mobile for anything uncertain
- Daily two-site till-to-bank reconciliation
- Supplier statement matching at month-end
How it runs day to day
Staff forward or snap invoices the moment they arrive — that’s the entire process. The owner spends about twenty minutes a week in the approval queue. Her accountant still does the real accounting; they just no longer bill hours for data entry.
The outcome
94% of invoices now post without a human touching them. Month-end close fell from five days to one. The recovered 12 hours a week went where the owner wanted them: on the shop floor and on buying trips — the work that actually grows a retail business.
“Sunday nights were invoices and spreadsheets. Now they’re not. My accountant asked what changed — the books arrive reconciled.”