Purchase Order Reconciliation

finance accounting python automation procurement sme sideprojects buildinginpublic
Purchase Order Reconciliation

The finance director of a small manufacturer called me at month-end. She had £40,000 in invoices she couldn't match to purchase orders. Her accounts payable process was a spreadsheet and institutional memory.

I built a reconciliation tool. It reads POs and invoices, matches them by reference, and surfaces every discrepancy.

First run on 20 POs and 19 invoices:

→ 15 cleanly matched — processed immediately
→ 2 invoices with price variances over 5% — flagged for approval
→ 2 orphan invoices with no matching PO — held pending investigation
→ 3 POs with no invoice yet received — chased with suppliers
→ Total unexplained variance: £360

The orphan invoices were the interesting ones. One was a re-submitted invoice for a job already paid. The other was from a supplier she hadn't ordered from.

Month-end closed. Took two hours to build.

Handles any currency, any threshold. Exports a full report to HTML.

Interested in this project?

I'm always happy to talk through how it was built, the problems it solves, or how something similar could work for you.