Invoice & PO Matching Automation for Fabrication Companies

The problem every fabrication company knows too well.

You take an order. You order steel, consumables, subcontract work. The goods arrive (sometimes in multiple deliveries). Then the invoices start landing — from the steel supplier, the paint company, the laser cutter, the haulier.

A person has to open each invoice, find the matching purchase order, check the goods receipt, chase missing information, and only then release it for payment. In a busy shop this is easily 8–15 hours per week of someone’s time. Mistakes get made. Suppliers get chased or get paid late. Cash flow and relationships suffer.

Kingsland Fabrications in Warrington was exactly in this position when they came to us.

What we actually built for a real UK fabricator

Kingsland originally approached us for a website. During discovery it became clear the bigger pain was on the shop floor and in admin: jobs were tracked on a Kanban board and a patchwork of free software. Invoices and POs lived in different systems. Reconciling them was manual, slow, and error-prone.

We built them a custom Manufacturing Execution System first. Then we layered on intelligent invoice and PO matching.

The system:

• Ingests supplier invoices (PDFs and email attachments)
• Extracts key fields (supplier, PO number, line items, values, VAT)
• Matches them automatically against open purchase orders and recorded goods receipts
• Flags mismatches for human review with clear reasons
• Creates the three-way match record ready for payment

The result for Kingsland: the constant human bottleneck of walking across the workshop or digging through folders largely disappeared for this process.

Why generic “AI invoice tools” often fail for fabricators

Most off-the-shelf invoice automation is built for accountants and service businesses. Fabrication has harder problems:

• Line items that reference drawings or part numbers rather than simple SKUs
• Partial deliveries against a single PO
• Price variations, quantity tolerances, and subcontract work
• Suppliers who send invoices in wildly different formats

A general tool either forces you to do too much manual work or makes too many mistakes. What works is a system built specifically for how fabrication companies actually buy and get invoiced.

How this turns into a commercial advantage

When admin time drops on reconciliation, that person can do something more valuable — chasing work, quality control, talking to customers, or even fabricating.

More importantly, the business stops losing enquiries and opportunities because someone was buried in paperwork instead of following up on a hot lead.

This is the kind of AI project that pays for itself very quickly in a fabrication environment.

Is this the right use case for your fabrication or manufacturing business?

This pattern appears again and again in the companies we work with:

• Multiple suppliers per job
• High volume of relatively low-value invoices
• Real cost when the information is slow or inaccurate
• Existing pain that the owner or office manager is personally tired of

If that sounds like your operation, this is one of the highest-ROI AI projects we do.

We always start with a proper discovery of your current process (how invoices arrive, where the POs live, how goods are receipted, who ultimately approves payment). Then we scope a minimum valuable version that removes the biggest chunk of manual work.

The work we did for Kingsland is production, not theory. We can show you exactly how it works in a real fabrication business.

Ready to stop losing hours every week to invoice chasing?

Ring us or book a free scoping call. We’ll look at your actual invoices and process and tell you honestly whether this is a good fit and what it would take to build.

This use case is grounded in production work delivered for Kingsland Fabrications, a steel fabrication specialist in Warrington. We continue to evolve the system with them.