The situation

The firm serves dozens of companies — each with its own rhythm, its own volume and its own way of sending documents. Some email their invoices, some send them over Viber, others bring a paper folder at the end of the month. Someone had to open every message, work out who it was from, rename it, file it in the right folder and pass it to the right accountant.

While the volume was small, this worked. But with every new client the order depended more and more on one particular person's memory. Month-end turned into chaos: hunting for a missing document across three channels, retyping invoice data by hand, and no certainty about which document was received and when. If a client asked "did I already send you that invoice?", the answer was often "let me check" — followed by half an hour of digging.

What we did

We did not change how the firm does the accounting — we changed how documents come in and get distributed. The goal was simple: every document should have one entry point, one place, and one clear trail of who received it and when.

1. A client portal and email intake — clients upload documents to a secure portal, and for those who prefer email, a dedicated address takes the attachments in automatically. Both channels flow into the same entry point.

2. Automatic classification — every incoming document is recognised by client and by type (invoice, bank statement, contract, other) and lands in the right folder without manual renaming.

3. OCR-assisted extraction from invoices — for invoices, the system reads the key data (supplier, number, date, amount, VAT) via OCR and offers it for review, instead of it being retyped by hand.

4. Routing and an audit trail — the document is routed to the accountant responsible for that client, and every action is logged: which document, when it was received, who took it on. The audit trail is always available.

5. Deadline reminders — when an expected document is missing before a deadline, the system nudges — first the client, then the accountant — instead of us remembering it on the last day.

The result

Month-end did not become magically instant — it became calmer. The "who sent what" hunt effectively disappeared, because the answer now sits in one place. The roughly reduced manual sorting freed up time that went into the actual accounting work rather than admin. And perhaps most important: when a client asks whether a document has been received, the answer takes seconds, with a date, instead of "let me check".

What did not work the first time

If you run an accounting firm and recognise the picture, our articles Digitalization for accounting firms and OCR: how machines read documents are useful. We describe the whole approach to organising document flow on the Digitalization service page.