Automatic invoice processing: how OCR and AI work and why 62% of Czech companies still do it by hand

An accountant at one of our clients was processing around 200 received invoices every month. She opened each one, typed the data into the accounting system and saved it. An average of 3 minutes per invoice. Six working hours a month spent entirely on transcribing numbers that were already printed on paper or in a PDF. Today it all runs automatically.

Why 62% of companies still do it by hand

Research shows that more than half of Czech companies have not yet automated the processing of received invoices. The main reasons are three: the belief that automation is complex and expensive, fear of errors in accounting and not knowing what solutions actually exist.

Yet available solutions today are sophisticated enough to read invoices from PDFs, email attachments and scanned paper documents, with accuracy that exceeds manual transcription for standard invoices.

How the whole process works

Receiving and recognising the document

Invoices arrive by email as PDFs or attachments. The system automatically captures them from a designated mailbox or folder, identifies that it is an invoice and passes it for further processing. Paper invoices can be processed by scanning or photographing with a mobile phone.

OCR and data extraction

OCR (optical character recognition) reads the text from the document. AI adds structural understanding on top: it recognises which number is the invoice number, which is the supplier tax ID, which line is the tax base and which is VAT. Unlike older OCR systems, modern AI handles this even for non-standard invoice layouts or varying field positions.

Validation and posting

Extracted data is automatically verified against the supplier database in CRM or the accounting system. If everything matches, the invoice is posted automatically. If there is a discrepancy (unknown supplier, amount outside the usual range, missing field), the system alerts the accountant who checks that invoice manually.

What it actually delivers

For the client mentioned with 200 invoices a month, 85% of invoices are now processed automatically without any manual intervention. The remaining 15% are exceptions, non-standard formats or new suppliers that the accountant checks. The total time spent on invoice processing dropped from 6 hours to less than 1 hour per month.

But the benefit goes further: an invoice received on Friday afternoon is posted by Monday morning automatically, regardless of whether the accountant is in the office. Error rates dropped to near zero, because manual transcription is the source of most accounting errors.

What it costs and how to deploy it

Deploying basic invoice automation for a company with up to 500 invoices a month costs roughly the equivalent of one to two months of an accountant's salary. Return on investment is typically within four months. For higher volumes pricing is individual, but the ratio shifts further in favour of automation with every additional invoice.

Deployment happens in two phases: connecting to the email mailbox and setting up extraction rules, then integrating with the accounting system (Pohoda, ABRA, Money S3 and others). The entire project from start to live production typically takes three to four weeks.

Want to know how many of your invoices could be automated? Book a free audit. We will go through your current process, the connection to your accounting system and prepare a specific proposal with a cost and savings estimate.