Alex Idachaba

Back to Work

Workflow diagram for the invoice processing automation, showing invoices arriving, being read, checked, and approved or flagged
Scroll sideways to follow the workflow. Open full size

Invoice Processing Automation

Reads, checks, and files incoming invoices automatically. Clean invoices go straight through; anything questionable gets a person's review before it's paid.

The problem

Invoices are keyed in by hand, checked by eye, and buried in a shared inbox, with no easy record of what came in.

What it does

  • Accepts invoices from an upload form, an email forwarding rule, or a shared drive
  • Reads PDFs directly and scanned images through OCR
  • Extracts vendor, amount, date, and line items
  • Checks each amount against the vendor's expected range
  • Approves in-range invoices; flags the rest for a person
  • Logs every invoice in a searchable database

How it's built

  • Main workflow: Invoice Intake, Extraction & Evaluation
  • External service: self-hosted OCR (Flask + Tesseract), reached securely through a Cloudflare Tunnel

Pattern: Evaluator-Optimizer

Built to fail safely

Extracted data is validated before it's trusted. Failed checks are retried, never silently passed. Every invoice is logged. Anything uncertain goes to a person.

The outcome

No more hand-keying clean invoices, questionable ones flagged instead of missed, and an instant answer to "how many invoices came in this month, and how many needed review?"