Order-to-invoice automation for an office furniture dealer

Situation

An office furniture dealer in Eschborn, 12 staff, about €3.2 million in annual revenue, selling desks, chairs and acoustic panels to companies in the Frankfurt office belt. Orders arrived through a web shop and through a quote form. Each one was then typed into three places by hand: the CRM, so the sales team saw the account, the accounting system, so an invoice could be raised, and a delivery spreadsheet, so the warehouse knew what to put on the van.

Two office staff shared this work, about eight hours a week between them. Invoices went out one to two working days after the order, and about six a month needed a correction because a delivery address or a VAT number had been mistyped. Nobody had ever lost an order. Everyone was tired of the retyping.

The three systems were all standard products with published interfaces. The company had assumed that connecting them needed a big project.

Approach

Two to three systems with straightforward logic is the entry tier, and this was exactly that. We mapped the flow on a whiteboard in the first meeting: a paid order in the shop or an accepted quote creates or updates the customer in the CRM, creates a draft invoice in the accounting system with the correct VAT treatment, and adds a row to the delivery list with the requested date. A person still checks and sends the invoice. Nothing goes out without a click.

The integration runs as a small service on a German server, at about €20 a month paid by the client, with a log of every transfer and an email to the office if anything fails, for example when a customer enters a VAT number that does not validate. Failed items wait in a list rather than vanishing.

Week one was mapping and a test run against copies of real orders. Week two connected the live systems with the automation in observe mode, so the office could compare its manual entries against what the service would have done. Week three switched it on and removed the manual steps.

Result

In this scenario the retyping stopped. About 8 hours a week came back to the two office staff, roughly 400 hours a year, which they now spend on customer follow-up and quotes. Invoices go out the same day as the order. Corrections fell from about six a month to about one, and the one that remains is usually a customer changing their mind. The warehouse reads the delivery list from a screen instead of asking the office.

What it cost

€4,900 fixed price, quoted before the work started, for three systems connected with straightforward logic, a failure email to the office, and a transfer log. Hosting at about €20 a month and the client’s existing software subscriptions are third-party costs, paid by the client and excluded from the guarantee. The integration is covered by our 100% money-back guarantee: full refund on request within 14 days of delivery, and for a monthly retainer the first month is refundable in full.

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