INV-0048213.pdf. It arrives from the wholesaler every Thursday with the dry goods order, attached to an email that says nothing else. The brewery sends theirs as a link you have to click. The fish man texts a photo of a handwritten sheet. The veg supplier hands it to the kitchen porter with the crates and it ends up damp on the pass.
Once a month someone sits down with a shoebox and types them in. Or the bookkeeper does it, at an hourly rate, and asks about the ones that went missing.
The system watches the inbox. Any email from a known supplier with an attachment or a link gets picked up. The PDF is read: supplier, invoice number, date, line items, VAT, total. The photo from the fish man gets read too, with less confidence, so those are marked for a glance. Each one is posted to Xero as a draft bill against the right supplier and the right account code, food, drink or sundries, which you set up once.
They land as drafts. You still look before anything is paid. The difference is you look at a list of filled-in bills instead of a pile of PDFs.
The useful part is the comparison. Every line item is matched against what you paid the same supplier for the same thing last time. Cooking oil up 9 percent since August. Chicken thighs up for the third month running. Those lines are marked in yellow in the draft and listed in a Friday email, so you know before the margin on the Thursday special quietly disappears.
Duplicates get caught too. The brewery has a habit of sending the same invoice twice when a delivery is split. The second one is flagged against the first rather than posted. The email that cannot be read, a scan at an angle or a new supplier you have not set up, goes into a folder called Check with a note on what went wrong. Most weeks it is empty.
This is the kind of thing we build. It works inside your Gmail or Outlook and your Xero, and the bookkeeper gets a cleaner month end.