The extracted invoice lines became a catalog: every item bought on the project, its unit price ex GST, who sold it, and when. Estimating now starts from what was paid, not what was quoted.
Estimates for the next project were built from supplier quotes and memory. The last project's actual prices, thousands of them, were locked in PDFs. Nobody could say quickly whether a new quote for scaffold hire was high or normal.
The output of the invoice reader, cleaned into one table: date, supplier, invoice, description, quantity, unit, unit price ex GST, amount ex GST, category, and whether the line passed validation. Invoices that arrived GST inclusive were converted. Lines with no quantity or a zero price, like delivery fees, were kept but marked.
Categories were assigned by the model from the description and the supplier, then checked against the Procore cost code the invoice sat under. Where they disagreed, the line is flagged.
The catalog lives in a small database and a spreadsheet export. Questions it answers in seconds:
The estimator opens the catalog before opening a quote. The finance manager uses the same table to argue with suppliers about price creep. And the Procore cost codes got tidied up, because the flagged lines showed where invoices had been filed under the wrong code.
The catalog is as good as the invoices. Handwritten dockets and photos are in there with lower confidence and are marked as such. It is a record of what was paid, not a price list.
Bring one month of invoices. Twenty minutes. We show you what we would have caught.
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