The Invoice Problem Nobody Talks About
Every week, your stores receive invoices from multiple suppliers. These invoices are supposed to reflect what was ordered, at the agreed price, for the correct quantities. In practice, they often don’t.
Studies across the retail industry consistently show that 1-3% of invoices contain errors — wrong prices, incorrect quantities, missing promotional discounts, or items that were never delivered. For an operation processing hundreds of invoices per month, that adds up fast.
What Goes Wrong
Price Discrepancies
The price on the invoice doesn’t match the price that was agreed or quoted at the time of ordering. This happens more often during promotional periods when prices are changing frequently.
Quantity Mismatches
Items listed on the invoice that weren’t actually delivered, or quantities that don’t match the delivery docket. This requires cross-referencing multiple documents — something that rarely happens in a busy store.
Missing Credits
Returns and credits that should appear on the invoice but don’t. Without a system to track what credits are outstanding, these simply get lost.
VAT Errors
Incorrect VAT rates applied to products, or VAT calculated on the wrong base amount. These are subtle and almost never caught manually.
The Manual Checking Problem
Some diligent retailers do spot-check invoices. But checking every line on every invoice from every supplier, every week, across multiple stores? It’s not practical. The time cost alone would outweigh many of the errors caught.
This is where most retailers give up and simply pay the invoice as-is, accepting that some errors will slip through.
How OCR Changes Everything
Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology can now:
- Scan and digitise every invoice automatically
- Extract line items, prices, quantities, and totals with high accuracy
- Cross-reference against your original orders and agreed pricing
- Flag discrepancies for human review before payment
The key advantage? It does this for every invoice, every time, with no fatigue and no shortcuts. The system catches what humans can’t — or won’t — find time to check.
Real-World Impact
For a typical 5-store group processing around 200 invoices per month:
- Average error rate: 1.5% of total invoice value
- Monthly invoice value: ~€500,000
- Errors caught per month: ~€7,500
- Annual recovery: ~€90,000
That’s €90,000 per year that would have simply been paid to suppliers in error.
Getting Started
Invoice OCR processing works best when combined with procurement automation. When the system knows what you ordered and at what price, it can instantly spot when an invoice doesn’t match.
Retail Ctrl’s Invoice Processing module integrates directly with your procurement data, creating a closed loop from order to delivery to payment.
Ready to stop paying for supplier errors? See how Invoice Processing works or get in touch.