1. Collect before you automate
You cannot automate what you cannot see. Before any OCR or classification, you need every supplier invoice arriving in one place. That usually means a shared inbox with a predictable address, and a habit — enforced with suppliers — of using it.
2. Read the PDF, don't rekey it
Modern OCR reads PDF invoices better than a junior clerk in a hurry. What matters is the fields you actually need: vendor, reference, amount, VAT, due date. Anything else is a distraction.
3. Classify against your chart of accounts
The value is not in extracting the numbers. It's in deciding what the invoice is — which cost centre, which account, which project. This is the part that used to require judgement, and where Digital Employees earn their salary.
4. File it where it belongs
Automation ends the moment someone still has to move the file. Filing has to happen in the same pass, into the same archive your accountant already uses.
5. Escalate the edges
The last ten percent of invoice work is where the mistakes hide. A good automation stops on uncertainty and flags a case for review, instead of guessing and shipping a wrong classification into your books.