The real cost of typing in a supplier bill

Ask an owner how long the bills take and you will hear "an hour or two". Sit with them while they do it and the figure is always worse, because the typing is not the slow part.

Where the time actually goes

Forty bills a month is an ordinary number for a single café. Watch a month go past and the work breaks down roughly like this.

Finding them. They arrive in three places. Some come by email from the supplier's accounting system. Some are handed over on paper with the delivery and live in a folder until somebody remembers. A few are only ever in a WhatsApp photo. Before anything can be typed, somebody has to be confident they have all of them — and that confidence is the thing that takes the longest to get.

Reading them. A bill from a drinks wholesaler and a bill from a linen company do not put the same information in the same place. The total is easy. The VAT breakdown, the due date, the variable symbol or payment reference, and whether that line is a deposit or a delivery charge are not.

Typing them. This is the part everyone thinks about, and it is maybe a third of the time.

Catching the duplicates. The supplier resent it because the first one bounced. The delivery driver left a copy and the office emailed one too. You now have the same bill twice, and you will find out either when you notice, or when you pay it twice.

Paying them. Then the account number and reference get typed again, into the bank.

Which parts a machine can honestly take

Not all of them, and anyone who says otherwise is selling something.

Reading is genuinely solvable. A PDF from a supplier's accounting system is structured data wearing a costume, and the EU e-invoice formats — ISDOC in Czechia, ZUGFeRD and XRechnung in Germany, Factur-X in France — are structured data not even bothering with the costume. A photograph of a paper bill is harder, and a machine should say when it is unsure rather than guess quietly.

Duplicate-catching is solvable and nobody should be doing it by hand. Every bill has a supplier, a number, a date and an amount; a second one with the same four is the same bill.

Paying is solvable, because banks accept files. SEPA credit transfer across most of Europe, the ABO format in Czechia, QR-bill in Switzerland. If the account number is already in the system, typing it into a banking screen is a step that exists only because nothing joined the two up.

Checking is not solvable, and should not be. Somebody who knows the business has to look at a bill and say yes. What a machine can do is make that the only thing left.

What is left over

When the finding, reading, de-duplicating and paying are handled, what remains is a queue of bills with their fields filled in, waiting for somebody to approve them. That is a job you can do in fifteen minutes with a coffee, and — more to the point — it is a job you can do weekly rather than saving up for a Sunday.

Which is the real win. Bills typed up weekly mean you know what you owe. Bills typed up on the last Sunday of the month mean you find out about a price rise five weeks after you agreed to it.

BizBoard reads supplier bills out of your inbox, drops the duplicates, puts the approved ones on your payment calendar and turns them into a file your bank accepts. See how the bill reading works.