The paperwork somebody is still typing in.
Invoices, delivery notes, order forms, statements. They arrive as PDFs or as photographs, and somebody reads them and types the numbers into something else. We build the part that actually matters, which is not the reading.
One kind of paperwork
$3,650
“The same stack of documents gets retyped into the same system every week.”
- One document type, landing in the system you already run
- A queue of the ones a person still has to look at, with the reason attached
- It stops rather than guessing when it is not sure
- A short written guide, in plain words
- Ninety days of fixes after it goes live, at no charge
Reading the document is the cheap half.
Microsoft, Amazon and Google all sell document reading, and they sell it by the page. A business putting a thousand invoices a month through Microsoft’s own invoice model pays about ten dollars for the reading. That is the whole of it.
Plain text off a page
$1.50 / 1,000
An invoice, with its line items
$10 / 1,000
So we do not sell reading, and you should not pay anyone much for it. What costs money is everything after it: the ones it could not settle, who looks at those, and what happens while they wait.
9%
of documents still need a person, at the best-run operations measured. This is the floor, not the starting point.
22%
at everyone else. Between one in ten and one in four is the honest range, and no product takes it to zero.
That queue is the product. Not a pile of failures to be cleared at the end of the month — a short list, each with the reason attached, in front of the person who can answer it.
The one we built does not read the document at all.
S J Construction runs four building sites. Deliveries arrived with a paper note, and once a month somebody typed the receipts into a spreadsheet.
What the note said
200 bags of cement.
What somebody counted
194 off the truck. The delivery is paid on this one.
A delivery note, photographed on a phone, on a building site, with a quantity sometimes written by hand, is the hardest thing you can hand to a document reader. Handwriting drops below seventy per cent. Faded and skewed scans degrade badly. A supplier changing their layout breaks a template outright.
So we did not try. The supervisor is already standing at the truck. He counts, and taps the number into a form pinned in the group his team was already using. The system keeps both figures and values the delivery on the one a person counted.
Sometimes the answer to paperwork is not to read the paper. Deciding which of the two it is, for your documents, is most of what you are buying.
A second document job, and this one you can run yourself. Ledger Solutions keeps the books for other companies. It stops the invoice and attaches the reason. The invoices inside are invented, so anyone can push it at the edges.
When you should buy a product instead.
Most paperwork problems are not worth a build, and the honest prices are published by the people selling them.
Reading invoices into an accounting system
from $25/mo
Ordinary accounts-payable automation
from $99/mo
The full thing, order against delivery against invoice
about $850/mo
If your documents are ordinary invoices and they need to land in ordinary accounting software, one of those is the better buy and we will say so. It works in a month and there is nothing to build.
There is no bigger package on this page for the same reason. Above one document type, a product is usually the right answer, and quoting you a five-figure build against an $850 subscription would be us selling to ourselves.
What is left is narrow and it is where we are worth paying: when the documents have to land in a system you own that none of those products connect to, or when the reading itself is the part that will not work.
The useful part is what it refuses to do.
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It never decides anything that costs money.
It can work out that a delivery is short or that a total does not agree. A person still says what happens next. Every system on this site draws that line in the same place.
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It stops rather than guessing.
A number it is not sure about goes in the queue with the reason attached. It does not write a confident figure into your accounts and leave you to find it later.
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We publish no accuracy figure, and you should distrust the ones you are shown.
Every product in this category advertises ninety-nine per cent. On a thousand documents that is ten wrong ones, and the number does not tell you which ten. What matters is whether the ten are in a queue or in your ledger.
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We will not read something that cannot be read reliably.
Handwriting, poor photographs and documents whose layout changes every month. If that is your paperwork, the answer is to capture it at the point somebody already knows the number, and we will tell you so rather than sell you a reader that will be wrong.
What the price does not cover.
The price covers what is on the list above. Anything else is a change: we price it in writing, and you say yes before we start.
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A second kind of document
Each document type is its own job, because each one has its own fields, its own edge cases and its own reasons to stop.
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The place the work lands, if there is not one yet
If there is no system for the numbers to go into, that comes first and it is priced on its own page. The system you run on.
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The reading itself, billed by whoever does it
Charged to you directly, in your own name, by the page. We tell you the expected monthly figure before you agree, and we never sit between you and that bill.
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Moving years of old documents in
Getting the back catalogue out of where it lives now is its own job, and its own quote.
The promise, with the conditions next to it.
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A written list of checks, agreed before we start.
We run your real documents, with the right answers known in advance, and we write down what the finished thing has to get right. That list is the only test. If a check fails we keep fixing it at no extra cost until it passes.
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A date, and a clock that pauses.
You get a date in writing when the list is agreed. The clock pauses while we are waiting on you — logins, sample documents, a decision.
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We come back on day 7, day 14 and day 30.
Named days. The first week is when real documents behave differently from the samples, and the thirtieth is when we find out whether the queue is actually being worked.
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A full refund inside seven days if it misses the scope.
The written list above is the scope. If what we deliver does not do what that list says, email us within seven days of delivery and the payment comes back. That is the same clause in our terms, not a friendlier version of it for a sales page.
When it is running, somebody has to be watching it.
Paperwork keeps arriving after we hand over, and the day a supplier changes their form is the day it quietly stops matching. Keeping it alive is its own job, and it is the same job whatever we built — one ladder, and you pick how much of it you want.
Watch
$549 per month
“It runs. I do not want to be the one who notices when it stops.”
- We are told the moment a run fails, and we tell you
- A written note every month of what ran, what failed and what we did
- Broken things fixed by the next working day
- Your accounts stay yours — we hold access, not ownership
Guard
$849 per month
“I need to know about the runs that finish and quietly do nothing.”
- Everything in Watch, plus:
- We check the runs that finish but do nothing, where there is something to count
- Broken things fixed the same working day
- Changes are unlimited — they join a queue and we work through it in order
Managed
$1,200 per month
“I do not want to run it at all. I want somebody whose job it is.”
- Everything in Guard, plus:
- We operate it, not you
- A named person, and the name of their backup
- Reachable outside business hours when something is genuinely down
- Your changes are worked ahead of everyone else’s
Monthly, in advance. Thirty days’ notice either way, from either side. Offered after a build, never before — we will not sell you a plan to watch something we have not seen.
Not sure whether your paperwork fits this?
Write to us and describe the problem in your own words — no form, no call. We will tell you which one we would pick, what is good and bad about that choice, where it would be the wrong buy, and what it costs. If the honest answer is that you do not need any of it, we will say that instead.
If the documents already live in a system you pay for — a CRM, SharePoint, a shop — the platforms we build on sets out what we touch in each one, and the published limit on each that decides how the job has to be built.
Tell us what gets retyped.
What the document is, how many arrive, where the numbers end up, and who types them now. We will tell you whether this is a build or whether you should buy something off the shelf. We reply within one business day.