Case studies·Capability
Invoices that reach the right person, with the right paperwork
About 1,800 invoices a year, each sent to the supervisor in charge of that job site with its paperwork attached. Anything the system isn't sure about is set aside for a person to check, and a checklist shows every invoice that's missing its paperwork.
RJ Bruno Inc.·Commercial plumbing contractor · Staten Island, NY
(est.)Hours saved are estimates based on how much work the system handles each week, not stopwatch measurements.
The problem
RJ Bruno does work at a large number of job sites for one customer. That customer assigns every site to a supervisor, every supervisor to an administrator, and so on up the chain. Each invoice has to reach the right person with the right paperwork attached, or it gets stuck.
Before, someone in the office did all of this by hand. Read the invoice. Work out where the job was. Look up who's in charge of that site. Find the matching statement of service. Combine the files. Write the email. Every week, for every invoice. The invoices with an unclear site name were the easiest to send to the wrong person. The invoices with no paperwork in the folder were the easiest to miss entirely.
What we built
The office drops in two things: the open-invoice report and the folder of invoice PDFs. The system does the rest. Here's what the office sees:
- It reads the report no matter how the columns are laid out, and skips any invoice that's already paid or past the cutoff date.
- It reads each invoice PDF for the invoice number, the release number, who it was billed to, and where the work was done.
- It looks up the job site on the customer's chart of who reports to whom, and finds the supervisor in charge, their administrator, and their deputy director.
- If it isn't sure which site an invoice belongs to, it doesn't guess. The invoice is set aside with a short list of every possible destination, so a person can pick the right one.
- It pairs each invoice with its statement of service using the release number. If there's no statement on file, it builds one from the invoice's line items. Then it combines both into one file.
- It writes the email for each bundle, addressed to the supervisor with the office copied in, ready to send.
- It produces a checklist of every invoice on the report that has no matching PDF in the folder, with a one-click email to ask for it.
What it means for the business
An estimated 310–625 hours a year (est.) back in the office. Every invoice goes out the same way every time, no matter who runs it or when. The mistakes that used to hide — an invoice sent to the wrong supervisor, a missing statement, an invoice with no paperwork behind it — are now either handled or set aside for a person to decide.
None of this is specific to one customer. Any contractor that bills across many sites for a customer with a chain of command — property managers, school districts, hospital systems, public agencies — has the same problem. The invoice says where the work happened. Someone has to turn that into who gets it. Now that part is handled.
Payroll, invoices, paystubs — that used to eat our week, and I always worried something would go out wrong. Now it runs on its own, it flags what it isn't sure about, and the sensitive stuff is locked down. I got my office back.
Have a process like this eating your week?
Tell us what it is. The first step is a working call — no prepared pitch, no commitment — to figure out whether it's the kind of repetitive, rule-following work that belongs in a system instead of on someone's desk.