Document Intelligence
Our client delivers comprehensive payroll and HR solutions for businesses and independent professionals. Their platform streamlines onboarding, contract management, and salary processing, ensuring compliance and efficiency. With a focus on transparency and reliability, they help organizations manage workforce administration with confidence.
The Challenge
Employees were losing significant time manually reconciling client-side detailed timesheets (often in various formats: scanned PDFs, photos, Excel, etc.) against consultant-side logged hours. This manual process delayed payments, increased the risk of cash flow gaps, and scaled linearly with business growth. Reconciliation issues were often only discovered at invoice due date, further extending payment cycles.
Our Approach
- Extended our client's web portal to support uploading detailed, signed timesheets
- Designed a Microsoft AI workflow to extract key data (employee name, period, total hours) from uploaded documents
- Automated matching of extracted hours with portal records
- Implemented notification logic: successful matches trigger confirmation; mismatches alert a user or Teams channel for manual review
Implementation Process
Integrated AI-driven document processing into the portal's upload workflow. Developed logic to compare extracted and reported hours, automating the majority of reconciliations. Established escalation paths for exceptions (e.g., mismatches, unreadable formats).
Collaborated closely with our client's IT and portal vendor for validation and rollout, ensuring seamless integration with existing workflows and maintaining data integrity throughout the process.
"This type of operation slow-down is often overlooked, but with AI we can do something about them."
— Managing Director
Results & Impact
The implementation delivered immediate operational improvements across multiple dimensions. Reduced manual reconciliation workload for our client's employees, accelerated payment cycles and reduced cash flow risk, and improved accuracy and auditability of timesheet processing.
Most importantly, positioned our client for scalable growth without linear increases in administrative effort, enabling the team to focus on higher-value client service activities.
Technology Stack
The solution leveraged Microsoft's AI ecosystem to create a seamless integration with existing workflows, ensuring reliability and scalability.
- Microsoft AI Document Processing (Azure Form Recognizer/OpenAI)
- Microsoft Teams for notifications and escalations
- Client's custom web portal for structured/unstructured data handling
- Integration with Excel/Word for downstream processes
Key Learnings
Automating reconciliation of semi-structured documents delivers immediate ROI in professional services. The key to success lies in understanding that not all documents will be perfectly readable, so building robust exception handling is crucial.
Early and close collaboration with client IT and vendors is critical for successful integration. Exception handling and user-friendly escalation are essential for trust and adoption, ensuring that edge cases don't undermine confidence in the automated system.