Document Matching Cutting Costs by 60% Through Smarter Automation
1. About the Client
We worked with one of the largest homeworking travel companies in the UK, an organisation dealing with a huge number of bookings every day, each one adding to the pile of admin behind the scenes.
2. The Challenge
Travel is a surprisingly fragmented industry. There are good, solid systems for managing bookings, but plenty of important information still slips outside those systems. Many bookings are made directly on agent portals, and when a seat is booked with an airline, the confirmation often arrives as a PDF invoice or a statement by email. For a big business, reconciling all those invoices is a heavy, repetitive task. It takes a lot of people a lot of time, and even the most diligent teams can’t avoid mistakes. Unfortunately, those small errors can become costly very quickly.
3. How We Helped
We built an automated system that keeps an eye on their invoicing inboxes, picking out any emails that contain invoices or statements. From there, it extracts all the detailed information, whether from the email itself or the PDF attachment and turns it into structured data.
The system then compares this information with what’s in the booking system and highlights anything that doesn’t line up. It checks everything from commission amounts to ship and passenger names on cruise bookings. Finally, it presents the team with clear summaries and exception reports, so they know exactly where to focus.
4. What We Achieved Together
Now the team only needs to review exceptions that genuinely require human attention. Often, this means going back to suppliers when an invoice doesn’t look right. They have a much clearer understanding of the financial impact behind each discrepancy, which means they can plug leaks quickly before they grow. The whole process is faster, steadier, and far more reliable. And importantly, the people who used to wrestle with data entry now have the breathing space to focus on improving the business itself.
6. What This Means Going Forward
Manually checking invoices is drudgery. It’s repetitive, easy to slip up, and it draws focus away from work that actually needs human judgment. Letting AI take on that load, quietly and reliably, means fewer mistakes, lowered costs, and a team that can focus its energy where it genuinely matters.
