How to automate supplier invoice entry at a fiduciary firm

At a fiduciary firm, month end often looks the same: piles of supplier invoices to retype into the accounting software, line by line. It's work with no added value, prone to errors, tying up qualified staff exactly when they're busiest.

The good news: it's also one of the easiest tasks to automate. Here's how, in practice.

1. Centralise incoming documents

Before even talking about OCR, the first gain comes from order. As long as clients send receipts by email, WhatsApp, post or USB stick, someone has to sort them by hand.

The fix is a single entry point per client: a dedicated email address or a shared folder. Every document that lands there is automatically renamed, filed by client and month, and ready to process.

2. Extract the data with OCR

Optical character recognition (OCR) reads the invoice and extracts the useful information:

• the supplier and its UID number
• the invoice date and number
• net, VAT and gross amounts
• the IBAN or QR reference for payment

Current tools handle Swiss QR-bills very well, since they already contain the key data in structured form. For other formats, extraction improves with each invoice from the same supplier.

3. Keep an approval step

Automating doesn't mean losing control. Extracted data is shown to a staff member for approval before posting: they check in seconds instead of retyping everything.

Uncertain cases (illegible amount, unknown supplier) are flagged automatically. Human time goes where it's actually useful.

4. Pre-code and send to the accounting software

Once approved, the invoice is sent to the accounting software you already use: Bexio, Abacus, Banana or Sage. For recurring suppliers, the expense account and VAT code can be suggested automatically from history.

No software change is needed: the automation plugs into your existing tools.

5. Chase missing receipts automatically

The often-forgotten last link: receipts that never arrive. By matching bank statements against documents received, the system spots transactions without a receipt and sends the client a polite reminder, with no action on your side.

Where to start?

There's no need to automate everything at once. The most profitable approach is to start with the clients who generate the most documents, measure the time saved, then expand step by step.

Atech helps fiduciary firms in western Switzerland do exactly this: a free 20-minute audit identifies what can be automated in your firm and with which tools.