Five document jobs, one way of working.

Before: important checks depended on someone remembering to do them

Documents arrived by email, in shared folders, on memory sticks, and by hand. The tools were ordinary ones: a PDF reader, spreadsheets, the annual tariff, and two finance templates.

What was at stake

None of it looked urgent on the day. The work was routine and any one mistake was small. What made it worth taking seriously is what a small mistake turns into three weeks later.

• A shipment held up: a discrepancy nobody caught can delay a shipment being cleared.
• A charge nobody questioned: a rate that does not match the annual tariff gets paid, because nothing in the process forced the comparison.
• No way back to the source: if somebody questioned a row later, the filename was often the only route back to the document.

One approach, reused

The system reads the document, pulls out the details, applies that team’s rules, marks anything that looks wrong, and produces the file they already use. Each of the five jobs runs all five steps on its own.

1. 01Send them in. Staff upload a batch of documents, or the system picks the attachment up from an email.
2. 02Read them. The system works out what each document is and pulls out the details that job needs.
3. 03Apply the checks. Rules check VINs, compare records against each other, and test charges against the annual tariff.
4. 04Mark the exceptions. Anything missing, anything that disagrees, and anything the system was unsure about is flagged clearly.
5. 05Produce the file. A structured spreadsheet is generated and sent to the people who need it.

What made it hard: reading the document was the easy part

Software has been able to pull text off a scan for years. The difficulty is that each of the five jobs has its own idea of what a right answer looks like: a VIN that is exactly 17 characters; the same value appearing on all four shipment documents; a charge that matches the annual tariff; one supplier bill mapped correctly into two different finance templates; an attachment pulled out of an email, unlocked, and named from what is inside it.

And the documents do not cooperate. Scanned and digital documents varied in quality and layout, carried stamps and handwriting, and repeated line items down the page. The same detail could appear under a different label from one document to the next.

The five jobs

01 · Bill of Lading extraction

The whole batch is read in one go. Every VIN is checked against the rule that it must be exactly 17 characters. Sample run: 9 documents read, 6 valid VINs, 1 trimmed to 17, 1 short, 1 needs review.

02 · Comparing documents

The same fields from the Bill of Lading, commercial invoice, packing list and certificate of origin go into one table. Sample: eight fields across four documents, three disagree, two missing. Those five are what the team looks at.

03 · Checking freight bills

The tariff is loaded once and every bill line is matched against it. Sample: 8 lines checked, 4 correct, 4 charged too much, 8.18 over in total. None large on its own, which is exactly why they used to get through.

04 · One bill, two finance files

The bill is read once and both the finance import file and the payment voucher are filled from the same rows. Sample: 2 bills, 5 lines, 0 failed.

05 · Email attachment intake

The system takes the email, finds the attachment, unlocks it where allowed, names it from its contents, and files it so the next job can find it without anybody renaming anything.

The outcome: demonstrated, and reusable

The job transfers