AI Invoice Matching, Built for Fabrication Shops.
A fabrication shop's AP team faces a unique mess: steel suppliers with daily invoices, paint and finishes from multiple sources, fixings invoices that don't match POs because of substitutions, plus subcontractor invoices that need CIS treated correctly. We built this for Kingsland Fabrications — and the playbook ports cleanly to any fabrication or steel-stockholder operation.
The promise
Where it hurts
The fabricators reality.
Steel suppliers bill weekly, sometimes daily. Each invoice has 15-40 lines of grades, dimensions, and finishes — half of which are slight substitutions because the original spec wasn't in stock. Three-way matching against the PO and delivery note is genuinely complex: tonnages need to balance, lengths might be cut to size with a kerf allowance, and finishing surcharges land on a separate line. Your most experienced person is doing this by hand, on Friday afternoons, while the rest of the shop is asking when they can go home.
What we actually build
Tuned for fabricators.
Tuned for steel-supplier paperwork
The pipeline handles steel grades (S275/S355/etc.), section codes, tonnage vs. piece-count units, cut-to-size with kerf, and the dozen finishing variations (galv, paint, blast) that come on different lines.
Substitution-aware matching
When the supplier substitutes a grade or size, the system recognises the substitution against allowed-substitution rules — and flags only the cases that breach your tolerance or your project spec.
CIS handling for subcontractor invoices
Subcontractor invoices (paint, blast, machining) are recognised as CIS where applicable. Deductions are calculated and posted correctly to your accounts.
Exception routing — fast
Discrepancies route to the right person: tonnage variance → buyer, CIS gross status query → finance, suspected wrong-grade delivery → ops. Each gets one click to approve, query, or escalate.
Real engagement
The outcome.
AP team went from spending ~8 hours per week reconciling supplier invoices manually to ~20 minutes reviewing flagged exceptions. The clean 95% match through automatically, even across dozens of suppliers with different invoice formats.
"It used to be the worst job of the week. Now we just check what AI flagged."
Typical stack
We integrate with what you have.
- Sage 50 / Sage 200
- Xero
- Custom MES
- SharePoint / Google Drive
- Microsoft 365 / Google Workspace
If your stack isn't listed, ask — almost always we can integrate. We've connected to bespoke MES, ancient on-prem systems, and email-only interfaces.
Pricing
Fixed fee, phased delivery.
£3,200–£8,500 for build, ~£250–£500/month for hosting + tuning
From £3,200
Invoice matching for fabricators
- Workflow audit + industry-specific spec
- Build, integrations, and tuning to your real data
- Live deployment in your environment
- Ongoing tuning + accuracy monitoring
Questions
Things people in this industry ask us.
01 How does it handle our steel-suppliers' formats?
Modern vision-language models read every layout we've thrown at them, including stockholder daily-delivery sheets, scanned invoices from older suppliers, and the occasional emailed Excel that's clearly been retyped from a PDF. New supplier formats work day one.
02 What about CIS on subcontractor invoices?
Recognised automatically. CIS gross/net status is checked against your supplier records, deductions are calculated, and the line posts to your accounts with the correct CIS treatment. We tune the gross-status check during build so you never short-pay a verified gross subcontractor.
03 How does it cope with kerf allowance and cut-to-size variance?
Cut-to-size variances are configurable per supplier — typically a tolerance band around the spec'd length, with an alert if a delivery falls outside. The system distinguishes "supplier gave us slightly less than ordered" from "supplier gave us a wrong cut" using your historical patterns.
04 Can it work with our existing job-costing setup?
Yes — invoice lines get coded to the right job/cost code at match time. If your job-costing lives in the MES or in spreadsheets, we integrate there. Posting then flows through to whichever accounts package you use.
05 What if the supplier disputes a flagged invoice?
You get the full audit trail — original document, extracted data, matched PO and GRN, the exact reason for the flag. That makes supplier conversations short: "your invoice says X, our PO says Y, our delivery note shows Z." No re-investigation required.
Same pattern, different industries
Related solutions.
Let's see if we can help.
A 15-minute chat with Chris & Kay. No slides. No pitch deck. You tell us what's on your plate; we follow up by email with real thinking.