Accounting is the only department where the volume of manual entry grows along with the company's success. More sales mean more acts, invoices and delivery notes. In our assessments we regularly count the same thing: an accountant spends 3–5 minutes on a single incoming document, and at a flow of 800–1200 documents a month that adds up to 60–90 hours of pure number-keying. A week and a half to two working weeks of one specialist, spent retyping what is already written in a PDF, a scan or a photo from WhatsApp.
And the work itself is not accounting work. It is the work of a scanner, done for historical reasons by a person with a degree and a salary starting at 400,000 tenge.
What the source-document flow is made of
A typical month for a trading or service company looks like this: acts of completed work, electronic invoices, delivery notes for the release of inventory, bank statements, expense reports with receipts. The formats range from tidy PDFs to a photo of a delivery note filled out by hand by a warehouse worker. And each document has to be not just entered, but linked: to a contract, to a counterparty, to an order, to a line in the statement.
| Document | Time by hand | With the platform | What is left for a person |
|---|---|---|---|
| Act of completed work | 3–4 min | seconds | Confirm the posting |
| ЭСФ | 2–3 min | automatic | Discrepancies only |
| Delivery note (including handwritten) | 4–6 min | 10–20 sec of review | Disputed line items |
| Bank statement, single line | 1–2 min | auto-linking | Unidentified payments |
| Expense report with receipts | 8–12 min | 1–2 min | Approval |
In our assessments we see that up to 80% of source documents go through with no manual entry at all: the agent recognized the document, found the counterparty, matched it against the contract and the order, and prepared the posting. The accountant clicks "confirm" – or handles the 20% where something did not add up.
Recognition is the easiest part
Reading a PDF or a scan is something many tools can do today. The value is not in recognition, but in what happens afterward. The platform's agent does not just extract fields – it understands the document: it sees that this is an act under a work contract, finds that contract in the accounting system, checks that the amount does not exceed the remaining balance on the contract, that the VAT rate matches, and that the counterparty has not changed its details.
Handwritten delivery notes are a special pain for warehouses and production. The warehouse worker writes by hand, and the accountant later deciphers the handwriting. The agent recognizes handwritten text and checks the line items against the product reference catalog: "twenty bags of cem. M400" becomes a specific item with a code. Where it is not confident, the agent does not guess – it flags the line item and shows a fragment of the original next to its reading.
Discrepancies surface at the moment of receipt, not during reconciliation
A scenario from our assessments. A distributor, about a thousand incoming documents a month. The classic cycle: source documents get entered as time allows, discrepancies are discovered at the quarterly reconciliation with suppliers, and then come three weeks of correspondence: "your act says 1,840,000, ours says 1,804,000, go find it." By that point there is no one left to blame, and the difference is either written off or sits unresolved for months.
With the agent, a discrepancy surfaces on the day the document arrives: the amount in the ЭСФ does not match the delivery note, the act has an extra line item, the supplier billed a price higher than the one agreed in the specification. While the shipment is fresh and everyone still remembers it, the question is settled with a single email rather than a quarterly excavation. The agent prepares the reconciliation act itself: it collects the turnover for the counterparty, matches it against their act, and marks the lines that agree and the ones in dispute.
Period close: from firefighting to a process
The last week of the month in accounting is always the same: chasing down unposted source documents, begging managers for missing originals, hunting for unclosed advances. The cause of the rush is not the volume of work, but the fact that all of it is pushed to the end: documents pile up because someone only gets to them once a week.
Cost of manual source documents = (documents per month × minutes per document ÷ 60) × the accountant's hourly rate. At 1000 documents, 4 minutes and a rate of 2,500 ₸/hour that is ≈ 167,000 ₸ a month – direct entry alone, without the cost of errors and reconciliations.
When documents are posted on the day they arrive, closing stops being an event. By the first of the month only a handful of documents remain unposted – the very disputed ones under review – and the agent shows them as a separate list with reasons. The chief accountant can see the readiness of the period on any day of the month, instead of finding out about problems on the 28th.
What if the accounting system is old?
A common question at demos: "Our accounting system has no proper API, you won't integrate with it." We will. Where there is programmatic access, the agent works through integrations; where there is none, it works through the interface, like an operator: it opens the document form, fills in the fields, and posts. How this is arranged technically we covered in the article about agents without an API. For accounting this means there is no need to change your accounting system for the sake of automation.
Control stays with the accountant
The agent is not given the right to post everything without limits. You set the rules: documents below a certain amount and with a 100% match on details are posted automatically; anything above the threshold or with a discrepancy is posted only after a person confirms it. Every action the agent takes is logged: which document, where it came from, what it was matched against, who confirmed it. For an audit this is more convenient than manual entry – every posting has a full history of its origin.
Getting started looks like this: you hand us a batch of real documents – 50–100 of them, including the messiest scans – and in about a week you look at a prototype running on your own source documents, free of charge. Reaching production with a connection to your accounting system takes from 8 weeks. The platform works on a subscription starting at 12 million tenge a year, and source documents are usually only the first scenario: next the same agents take over reconciliations and reporting. More details are on the accounting solution page, and you can discuss your document flow at a demo.
Frequently asked questions
What about recognition errors? Who is responsible for an incorrect posting?
The agent works with a confidence threshold: doubtful fields are not posted silently but flagged and sent for human review – a fragment of the original is shown alongside. Auto-posting only kicks in for documents with a full match on details, and the boundaries of that "full match" are set by the chief accountant.
How legal is this from a tax-accounting standpoint?
The platform does not replace the accounting system and does not sign documents – it enters data and prepares postings, just as an employee would. Responsible persons, electronic signatures and the approval procedure remain yours. The agent's action log gives an audit trail more complete than with manual entry.
We have nonstandard documents from suppliers. Will the agent handle them?
This gets checked on the prototype within a week: you provide real documents, including handwritten ones and "phone photos," and you see the recognition rate on your own flow. Usually, after tuning for your document workflow, 15–20% of documents remain outside the automation – and those are exactly the ones an accountant should be looking at personally.