This client is a VAT consultancy in Dubai, UAE, handling invoice processing for clients across the emirate. Every month, the team received over 1,000 pages of scanned client invoices — a mix of clean digital PDFs, phone photos, faded scans, and handwritten notes — that needed to become clean, VAT-ready data before any filing or review work could start.
The problem
Before WorkZero, every invoice was keyed in by hand: merchant name, amount, VAT, date, line by line. The accounting software the firm already used could read a clean digital PDF reasonably well, but it struggled with the invoices the team actually received day to day — phone photos taken in poor light, stamped and handwritten delivery notes, and low-resolution scans. That gap meant the bulk of the work still fell to a person, every single month, regardless of filing deadlines.
The build
WorkZero built an automated pipeline that reads each scanned or photographed invoice, using Google Cloud Vision OCR to extract the raw text and Claude AI to identify and structure the fields that matter for VAT work — merchant, invoice number, date, line items, VAT amount, and total. A validation layer checks the extracted data against expected formats and VAT rules before anything is finalized, so errors get caught before they reach the sheet rather than after.
The output lands directly in a structured Excel file formatted to match what the firm's accounting software expects — no new system for the team to learn, no manual re-entry step in between.
The result
What used to take the team days at the start of every month now runs automatically. Staff time shifted from re-keying invoice data to reviewing it — the part of the job that actually requires their judgment.
"We process over 1,000 pages of scanned client invoices every month. Our team was manually keying every field — merchant, amount, VAT, date — into spreadsheets. WorkZero automated the entire pipeline. Scanned PDFs go in, a clean structured Excel comes out, ready for our accounting software. What used to take days now runs automatically." Dubai VAT Consultancy