Alfred: from invoices in the inbox to data ready for the ERP
How we turned the task nobody wanted —copying invoices from email into the system— into something that simply happens.
Monday, 8:30 in the morning. In accounts payable, the inbox shows 63 unread emails. Almost all of them bring the same thing: a PDF attachment with an invoice.
The ritual is familiar. Open the email. Download the file. Find the supplier’s name, the number, the date, the currency, the total, the taxes. Copy them into the system, one by one. Next email. Sixty-two more times.
Nobody chose this job for the thrill of copying numbers. And yet, in many companies, someone spends hours every week doing exactly that.
The problem isn’t reading an invoice
Reading one invoice is easy. The hard part is that no two are alike.
One supplier writes “Total”. Another, “Amount payable”. The one abroad, “Importe a pagar”. One date arrives as 12/09/2026, another as Sept 12, 2026 and another as 12-sep-26. The currency might be $, USD or U$S, and the thousands separator changes from country to country. Some invoices arrive spotless; others are a photo of a slightly crooked scanned page.
For a person, all of that is solved with judgement. For a system, it’s exactly where generic solutions fail.
What we built
Alfred was born so that Monday at 8:30 no longer exists. It works in four moments:
- It receives. Every invoice that reaches the inbox you choose flows into Alfred on its own, as soon as it arrives. Nobody has to open the email.
- It extracts. It finds the data that matters, however each supplier wrote it.
- It validates and chooses. It looks at each value more closely, in finer and finer stages, discards what doesn’t add up and keeps the right one. If you want to know how we think about that part, we tell the story in Rules first, models second.
- It delivers. Everything comes out in a single format, clean and organized, ready for your ERP.
The invoice from the supplier abroad, the crooked scan and the one that says “Amount payable” all end up exactly the same on the other side: same order, same dates, same numbers.
What changes
The most visible change is time: manual entry disappears from the calendar. But what teams value most is something else.
- Data arrives when the invoice arrives. Not at the end of the week, when someone found a moment.
- Everything speaks the same language. One format for hundreds of different suppliers.
- Every value has a history. If someone asks where a number came from, the answer is one click away.
- The team gets back to what matters. Analyzing, negotiating, closing the month earlier. Not copying.
What we learned building it
The temptation, when people talk about artificial intelligence, is to think a model solves everything. With Alfred we learned that the best result comes from combining: each tool does what it does best, and none of them works alone.
That’s why Alfred isn’t “an AI that reads invoices”. It’s a system that gets to the right value, and does it just as well on Monday at 8:30 as on Friday at 6 pm.
Does your team have its own Monday at 8:30? Let’s try Alfred with your invoices.