Stop typing supplier invoices: how invoice scanning works

Every stock system in the world depends on one unglamorous input: someone typing in the invoices. A mid-size restaurant takes fifteen to forty invoices a week, each with ten to sixty lines. That is several hours of someone's week spent copying numbers off paper — and it is the first thing dropped when service gets busy. Once a fortnight's invoices are missing, every report downstream is fiction.

What scanning actually does

1. You photograph the invoice, or upload the PDF the supplier emailed.
2. AI reads the document and pulls out supplier, date, invoice number, and every line: description, quantity, unit, unit price, line total.
3. Each line is matched against ingredients you already hold, so 'TOM PLUM TIN 2.5KG' lands on the tinned tomatoes you already stock rather than creating a duplicate.
4. Anything it is unsure about is flagged for you to confirm. You approve, and stock and prices update together.

What it catches that a human misses

• Silent price rises. If a case went from £18.40 to £21.10, the margin on every dish using it just moved — and the invoice is the only place that was ever written down.
• Short deliveries, when what was invoiced does not match what was signed for.
• Duplicate invoices paid twice, caught on invoice number.

Where a human is still needed

Handwritten credit notes, faded thermal paper, and a photo taken at an angle in a dark cellar will all produce something a person needs to check. Treat scanning as removing the typing, not removing the judgement. The realistic saving is most of the time, not all of it — which is still the difference between invoices being entered weekly and not being entered at all.

Invoice scanning is built into FoxEra and included in the free standard software.