Supplier invoices read by AI, approved by people and matched to shipments

A freight forwarder receives supplier invoices for every part of every shipment: carriers, agents, brokers, warehouses. Each one has to be checked, booked and tied to the right shipment file before it can be paid or charged on.

Mistakes cost in both directions: a cost missed on a shipment is margin lost, and a cost booked twice becomes a dispute with a supplier. Done by hand, this is slow and repetitive work that depends on a few experienced people. The master data behind it — commercial parties, offices, payment terms, broker rules, the parameters for Italian electronic invoicing — was spread across different tools.

One portal, four applications, one sign-in. At its centre is supplier invoice processing, where the first check matters more than it seems: a mailbox that receives invoices also receives reminders, statements and duplicates, and checking that a PDF is an invoice before extracting anything keeps the rest of the flow clean.

The four applications:

• Master data: commercial parties, offices, payment terms, broker rules and the parameters for the Italian e-invoicing exchange system (SDI), with a map view.

• Supplier invoice processing: an AI agent receives supplier PDF invoices, checks that each document really is an invoice, and extracts the data. Invoices are then mapped, approved and imported into the management system.

• Catalogue: a shared catalogue, managed in the same portal.

• Permissions: access control with seven roles, so that each person works only on what their role allows.

Approved invoices are imported into the management system and matched to shipment files through the API of the forwarder's operational system, so each cost lands on the right shipment.

Corporate single sign-on runs through Keycloak. A RabbitMQ message queue carries work between the parts of the system, SignalR updates the screens in real time as documents move, and scheduled jobs take care of recurring work. The interface is available in Italian and English.

Supplier invoices start as data prepared by the AI, not as manual entry. People review, correct and approve what the agent has extracted.

Master data, invoices, catalogue and permissions live in one portal with one sign-in, instead of in separate tools.

Because work moves through a message queue, a burst of invoices is absorbed and processed in turn instead of blocking the system.

• Angular 21
• .NET 9 and 10
• SQL Server
• Keycloak
• RabbitMQ
• SignalR