Wholesale
Colston Foundry
Matching invoices across a 40-branch wholesale chain
A shared inbox handled three-way matching and ate most of a week for two people every month. The agent clears the clean 92 percent; the rest still reach a person, and we priced that cost before the pilot began.
50
hours returned monthly
3.4
months to payback
92
percent accuracy
40
exceptions a month
Colston Foundry received close to five hundred supplier invoices a month across forty branches. Matching each one against a purchase order and a goods-received note lived in a shared inbox, and two people lost most of a week to it every month.
What we agreed before building
The agent pulls the line items, checks them against the purchase order, and posts the ones that match. A line that disagrees past a set tolerance, or a supplier the system has not seen, goes to a person instead. That confidence floor was fixed before any code was written.
What it actually cost
Ninety-two percent clear on their own. The other forty a month still land on a person, and each one takes longer than the original task because someone is now checking the agent’s work as well as doing it. Priced honestly, payback moved from 2.9 months to 3.4. Colston signed on the 3.4.