The client
A Bangkok bookkeeping firm closing month-end in Xero for thirty SME clients across Thailand. Six qualified bookkeepers. Most of their week went on data entry, not the advisory work their clients were paying for.
The problem
Every month, clients sent in their invoices and receipts in whatever format was nearest at hand. PDFs. Phone photos. Scans of paper. Emails forwarded with the receipt buried in an attachment. The first two weeks of every month, the bookkeepers were reading documents, typing them into Xero, picking the right account category, and chasing missing line items.
The approach
Every client got a shared folder. They dropped documents in throughout the month, in any format. n8n watched the folder. An LLM read each document, with prompts tuned for Thai-language receipts and English-language supplier invoices, and pulled out vendor, date, amount, tax line, line items, currency.
Each extracted invoice landed in an Airtable review queue with a suggested account category based on previous similar invoices for that client. The bookkeeper checked the suggestions, fixed the few the system got wrong, and approved the batch into Xero. About ninety-two percent of invoices needed no manual touch.
The result
Invoice processing per client per month went from twelve hours to about two and a half. The freed time went into actual financial advice, which is the work the senior partners had wanted to be doing for years. The firm took on eight new clients without hiring another bookkeeper.
"We added eight new clients without hiring a single bookkeeper. The team now spends most of their time advising clients instead of typing data. That is the work I have wanted them to do for years."