Ask a bookkeeper how long an invoice takes and the answer is "not long". Time it and the answer changes.
The simple invoice
A two-line supplier invoice (supplier, date, two items, VAT) takes one to five minutes to key into accounting software by hand. Find the supplier, check the tax code, type each line, check the total, attach the PDF.
The long invoice
A 26-line telecoms or materials invoice takes twenty to thirty minutes, because every line has to match a code and the totals have to reconcile. It's also where most typing errors happen.
What it adds up to
Minutes per invoice become hours per month quickly:
| Invoices a month | At 2 minutes each | At 4 minutes each |
|---|---|---|
| 100 | 3 h 20 min | 6 h 40 min |
| 300 | 10 h | 20 h |
| 1,000 | 33 h 20 min | 66 h 40 min |
Across all clients that is a real share of the week: the people who built Invoreg put invoice entry at 20 to 30% of a bookkeeper's time. Use our cost calculator to put your own numbers in.
What makes an invoice slow
- Lines. Every extra line is another code, quantity, price and VAT rate.
- New suppliers and items. Creating them in the accounting software before you can post takes longer than the invoice itself.
- Coding decisions. Which account, which project, which cost centre. Looking up how it was coded last time takes time.
- Poor captures. Phone photos, crooked scans and handwritten notes slow everyone down.
- Foreign invoices. Other languages, currencies and reverse-charge VAT need extra care.
- Duplicates. Spotting that an invoice was already entered means searching first. See the quiet cost of duplicates.
How to measure your own
- Pick twenty ordinary invoices and time each from opening the file to the saved bill.
- Time the long ones (ten lines or more) separately.
- Multiply each average by your monthly volume, per client.
- Add the time spent on corrections and duplicates you found later.
What automation changes
With AI reading the document, the job becomes read, check, register. In the Invoreg pilot, checking a simple invoice takes ten to thirty seconds and a 26-line invoice about two minutes: the time it takes to check rather than type. The accountant still makes the final decision, and nothing is posted until they click Register.
The time that remains moves to the exceptions: fields the AI flags as uncertain, new suppliers to confirm, approvals. See reading and registering your first invoice for what that looks like.
The other half of the work
Matching invoices to bank payments is most of the remaining bookkeeping time, and Invoreg does that too: it reads the bank statement, even a PDF, and matches each payment to its invoices. See bank reconciliation.