The client
A bookkeeping firm in Bangkok serving roughly thirty small and medium clients across Thailand, doing month-end accounts in Xero. Six bookkeepers, all qualified, all spending the bulk of their time on data entry rather than on the analysis their clients actually paid them for.
The problem
Each client sent in their monthly invoices and receipts as a mix of PDFs, photos taken on phones, scans of paper, and the occasional email forwarded with the receipt buried in an attachment. Bookkeepers spent the first two weeks of every month reading documents, typing the data into Xero, picking the right account category, and chasing missing line items.
The approach
The build set up a per-client folder pipeline. Clients dropped documents into their shared folder anytime during the month. n8n watched the folder, ran each document through an LLM with prompts tuned to Thai-language receipts and English-language supplier invoices, and pulled the relevant fields: vendor, date, amount, tax line, line items, currency.
Each extracted invoice landed in an Airtable review queue, with a suggested account category based on past similar invoices for the same client. The bookkeeper’s job became reviewing the suggestions, correcting the few the system got wrong, and approving the batch into Xero. The flow handled around ninety-two percent of invoices without intervention.
The result
Invoice processing time per client per month dropped from around twelve hours to about two and a half. The firm now uses the freed capacity to provide actual financial advice to its clients, which is the work the senior partners had wanted to be doing for years. They added eight new clients without hiring a single additional 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."