Turning a chat message into an approved invoice

A company keyed every vendor invoice into their ERP by hand. We built a bot that reads a message or a PDF, extracts the line items, and routes it for approval before it ever touches the ERP. Same idea works on QuickBooks, NetSuite, SAP, or whatever finance runs on.

The problem

This is one of the most common finance-ops gaps: every vendor invoice gets keyed in by hand — read the PDF, find the vendor, pick the right account, create the entry, get it approved. Multiplied across every bill that shows up in a month, it adds up to real accounting hours spent on data entry instead of finance.

What we built

A chat bot — we built this one for Slack, but Teams works the same way — that turns a conversation or an uploaded PDF into a purchase invoice in the ERP:

• Upload a PDF, and document AI extracts the vendor, line items, and amounts into a pre-filled form — no manual transcription.
• The form runs autocomplete against real ERP data — vendors, accounts, cost centers — so the person filling it in can't pick something that doesn't exist.
• Submissions route through an approval step right in the chat — approve, edit, or decline — before anything is written to the ERP.
• Every action is logged separately, so there's a full audit trail of who approved what.

The result

Vendor invoices go from a PDF or a chat message to an approved ERP entry in one step instead of five, with an audit trail that didn't exist before. The exact ERP and chat tool change the integration, not the approach.