Your first automation, step by step: incoming supplier invoices
The best starting project in most Swiss SMEs, because it is frequent, boring, and the errors are visible immediately.
If you want one concrete first project, take incoming supplier invoices. It meets every criterion: high volume, stable rules, and a mistake shows up the moment someone looks at the booking.
What the manual process actually is
A PDF arrives by email. Someone opens it, reads the supplier, the date, the invoice number, the net, the VAT, the total. They find the matching order or project. They type it into the accounting package. They file the PDF somewhere. Then the next one.
Eighty invoices a month at ten minutes each is about thirteen hours. That is the budget you are working against.
The four steps, in order
1. Get the data out of the document. A model reads the PDF and returns structured fields. This works well on typed invoices and less well on scans of stamped paper. Test with twenty of your actual invoices, not with samples from a vendor.
2. Match it to something you already know. The supplier must resolve to a record in your system, and the invoice ideally to an order. This is where projects fail, and the reason is never the model: it is that the same supplier exists three times in your master data.
3. Create a draft booking, never a final one. The output is a proposal that a person confirms. This single decision is what makes the project safe, auditable, and acceptable to your fiduciary.
4. Log what happened. Which document, which fields were extracted, what confidence, who approved it, when. Boring, and it is what lets you answer a question in eighteen months.
What good looks like after three months
Not one hundred per cent. Aim for the routine seventy per cent handled cleanly and the awkward thirty routed to a person immediately, clearly flagged.
A system that handles seventy per cent and admits the rest is far more valuable than one that attempts everything and is wrong occasionally without saying so. The first saves nine hours a month. The second costs you trust the first time a wrong VAT rate reaches the books.
The honest prerequisite
Before any of this, deduplicate your supplier master data. It is a day of unglamorous work and it determines whether step two works at all. No tool will do it for you, and every vendor who skips mentioning it is selling you a step-two failure.