Finance & checking

What gets in the way

A business that ships physical products receives a steady stream of invoices it has to trust, from couriers, suppliers and factories. Checking them properly means matching each line against what was actually ordered, delivered or agreed. That usually happens in a spreadsheet, by whoever has time. Some invoices get checked closely, some get waved through, and nobody is quite sure which.

The errors are rarely dramatic: a courier surcharge that should not be there, a duplicated line, a price that drifted from the one you agreed. They are small, easy to miss when checking by eye, and they repeat month after month.

Reporting has the same problem. Sales sit in Shopify, costs sit in the accounts, and the figures you actually look at live in a spreadsheet that someone copies them into. When the numbers disagree, finding out why takes longer than it should.

Typical examples

• Checking courier invoices against the consignments you actually sent, and flagging charges that do not match.
• Checking supplier and factory invoices against purchase orders and delivery records.
• Reconciling Shopify orders with the entries in QuickBooks or Xero.
• Turning the checks into a short list of exceptions for a person to review, rather than a pile of invoices.
• Producing the weekly or monthly figures from the same data, so the sheet, the accounts and the conversation agree.

At a Kent mattress maker, checks on courier and factory invoices are part of the second phase, now in progress. They follow a first stage that went from signed contract to live in about six weeks.

What a good result looks like

Fewer invoices read line by line, and a clear reason attached to the ones that need a second look. Reports that come from the same data as the checks, so nobody is arguing about which spreadsheet is right.

It does not replace your bookkeeper or accountant. It gives them cleaner input and less typing.

How a first stage works

I start by sitting with whoever does the checking today. We look at the sheets, the rules they apply and the checks that only exist in their head, then pick one set of invoices to do end to end first. Often it is the one that takes longest to check.

The software does the matching and a person still makes the call on what to query or pay. Each stage has a fixed price, agreed before work starts. First stages usually cost £5,000 to £10,000 and are scoped to go live in weeks, not months.

It works with the tools you already have: QuickBooks or Xero, Shopify, email and spreadsheets. If a system can export its data or has an API, it can usually be joined up. After go-live, a monthly support fee covers fixes, small changes and someone who knows the system.