Document Intake AI Agents for UK Businesses: Invoices, Delivery Notes and Forms Read Into Xero, Sage or Your ERP

Yes, in the part that matters. Older capture tools used fixed templates: draw a box round the invoice total on one supplier’s layout and the tool reads that box. Intelligent document processing uses an AI model that finds the total on a layout it has never seen. The AI only reads. The checks against your ledger and the review screen for unsure fields are ordinary software, and they decide whether the result can be trusted.

OCR (optical character recognition) converts a scanned or photographed page into plain text. On its own it cannot tell the VAT figure from the carriage charge. IDP, intelligent document processing, adds the next steps: it names the document, pulls out the fields you care about, checks them and passes them to the system that keeps the record. OCR is one step inside IDP, and AI invoice processing is IDP applied to supplier bills only.

It is the software that picks up every document arriving in a shared inbox or scanner, works out what each one is, reads it, checks it against the record it belongs to and files it. A delivery note gets matched to its purchase order. A customer PO becomes a draft sales order. A credit account form becomes a customer record waiting for approval. A person reviews anything the agent is unsure of.

The one that reads your own documents best, so test it on a sample. We compare model families such as OpenAI’s GPT, Anthropic’s Claude and Google’s Gemini, plus dedicated reading services, on your paper. Those services set hard limits worth knowing first. Microsoft’s Document Intelligence, on its Standard tier, takes PDFs and JPEG, PNG, BMP, TIFF and HEIF images up to 500 MB and analyses up to 2,000 pages in one request. We pick per document type after the test, and you can swap later.

Yes, while you subscribe to Xero. A note on Xero’s UK pricing page includes Hubdoc in its plans, on condition the Xero subscription stays connected. The same page lists smart document capture on its paid plans from Ignite upwards, and automated bill entry from Grow upwards. For receipts and supplier bills going into one Xero organisation, that is often enough, and we will say so on the call.

Not well. They suit receipts, supplier bills and statements going into Xero, Sage or QuickBooks, priced by the bookkeeping document: Dext from £24.17 a month billed annually, AutoEntry from £15.45 a month for 50 credits, both excluding VAT. A delivery note, customer PO or credit form has to be checked against something an accounts package does not hold, such as a purchase order and goods-in record in your ERP, a buyer’s price list or a credit limit. That is where a custom agent earns its build. So is a result that lands in two systems, say Sage 200 for the ledger and Linnworks for the return.

No. Document automation is the wider term: any software that moves a document through its steps without retyping, using templates, rules and approvals. AI document processing is the reading step inside it, where a model pulls fields from a layout it has not seen before. A document intake agent uses both. AI reads the page, and plain rules check it against your ledger, route it and file it. Most of the work in a build sits in those rules.

Check first, because it may cover you. Odoo’s invoice digitisation reads vendor bills with OCR and AI, one prepaid credit per document, and its email alias accepts only PDF and XML files. Business Central’s Payables Agent matches incoming purchase invoices to open purchase orders, and Microsoft says its older Copilot matching was validated in English only. Both centre on supplier invoices. Delivery notes, customer POs and application forms are where a custom agent usually starts.

Two published UK figures. For a back-office agent that handles data entry and invoice processing, Fulminous (page updated 23 September 2026) gives £30,000 to £90,000 before VAT. LeverX’s guide of 4 October 2026 gives £10,000 to £30,000 for a single-workflow agent, naming document triage and data extraction among its examples, and does not say whether VAT is included. These are other firms’ ranges. FactoryJet quotes a fixed price in writing after a short scoping call.

Usually, yes. In VAT Notice 700/22, HMRC describes software that scans incoming invoices and writes the details to the ledger; there the paper can go, as long as the saved image carries every VAT detail, unless you need the paper for another purpose. If a clerk keys the details in by hand instead, HMRC expects the original kept. So the agent stores the full image beside the record. Confirm your own policy with your accountant.

No, and it should stop anyone trying. A delivery note proves goods arrived; it is not the document VAT is reclaimed on, and GOV.UK lists it alongside pro-forma invoices and statements as paperwork that will not support a claim. So the agent treats a delivery note as proof of what arrived, pairs it with the order and the goods-in count, then holds until the real VAT invoice turns up. A delivery note posted as a bill is one of the first exceptions it raises.

MTD applies to your whole set of records, so no single tool settles it. What the agent can do is keep its part clean. HMRC’s notice says copy and paste is not a digital link, and accepts API transfer and CSV import. The agent posts by API. For each purchase, the notice asks for the time of supply, the value and the input tax claimed, and the agent records all three. Your accountant checks the full chain.

GOV.UK says VAT records must be kept for at least 6 years, or 10 years for businesses using the VAT One Stop Shop (OSS) or its older version, the Mini One Stop Shop (MOSS), which let a seller account for EU VAT through one return. That includes every invoice you receive, as the original or an electronic copy. The agent files the image where your team already keeps records, in your own storage, with a link from the ledger entry so an inspector can trace one to the other.

Not for a while, and not for every document. Under GOV.UK’s consultation response, e-invoicing becomes compulsory for every VAT invoice from 2029, which in practice means business to business and business to government sales. For that consultation it says a PDF does not count as an e-invoice. Delivery notes, customer POs, statements and forms sit outside that change, and suppliers will switch at different speeds. We build so that structured e-invoices skip the reading step.

The ICO says the Act opens up the full range of lawful bases (the legal reasons UK GDPR lets you use personal data) for significant automated decisions, provided you keep appropriate safeguards. This does not extend to special category data, such as health, ethnicity or religion. Its June 2026 update says all the Act’s data protection provisions are now in force. Our design keeps a person on any decision about an individual, such as refusing a credit account. Your data protection lead decides the lawful basis.

It can. Article 2 covers providers placing AI systems on the EU market wherever they are based, and providers and deployers (the firms that use an AI system in their own work) in a third country where the output of the AI system is used in the Union. A UK firm whose agent only reads its own supplier paperwork for its own UK ledger is a different case from one whose output reaches EU customers. Ask your legal adviser which applies to you.

Often, and the useful answer comes from your own paper. A clean printed Royal Mail, DPD or Evri proof of delivery is the easier case. A signed note with quantities corrected in biro, photographed in a van, is harder. We feed a batch of your old notes to the agent, score its reading against your goods-in team’s entries, and set it to flag any quantity it cannot read with confidence rather than guess.

Yes. Scanners in a goods-in office often batch a day’s paper into one file: three delivery notes, an invoice, a returns form. The agent names each page, works out where one document ends and the next begins, and handles each one on its own path. Long or mixed packets go to the slower, more careful route, and any page it cannot place goes to a person.

Yes, as drafts. The agent reads the buyer’s PO, finds the customer account, maps the buyer’s part numbers to your item codes, checks prices against that account’s price list and creates a draft sales order. Anything that does not match, such as an old price, a missing code or a delivery address you have never used, is shown to your sales office before the order is confirmed.

It waits for a person. Each field gets a confidence score, and you set the bar per field: a VAT number or a bank detail needs a far higher bar than a delivery reference. Unsure fields appear in a review queue with the spot on the page highlighted, so the reviewer checks one box, not the whole document. At first, every document waits for review until your team is happy with the results.

Yes. Working software on your own data comes before a contract. You choose a sample your team has already processed, from the last month or quarter, with personal details removed if you prefer. An early build reads them, and you compare its output with what your team entered, field by field. If it does not read your paper well, you have lost nothing but an hour.

You own the code and the repository from day one. The AI and hosting can run in your own accounts at cost, with no markup. Defects are fixed inside the build price for a cover period agreed before work starts. Support is optional: each change is quoted and approved, with no monthly minimum. If you want, FactoryJet can keep managing the servers, the AI models, the API connections and the maintenance.

Five things make a quote accurate. The document types and rough monthly volume of each. Ten to twenty real examples per type, redacted if needed, sent by email after the first call. The systems and versions involved, such as Sage 200 on premises or Business Central online. Who approves what today. And any date that matters, like a year end or an ERP go-live. Attach the written brief in the second step of the form and Bhavesh replies within one business day.

Two UK clients we can name. GPSUK, a promotional products supplier, runs its trade storefront on Commerceflo, built by FactoryJet, where business buyers see their own account prices and move from quote to order without retyping. For Sow Easy, a wholesale distributor, FactoryJet is building a WooCommerce trade store with Odoo as the source of stock, prices and SKUs. The Odoo integration is tested against Odoo’s staging system, and launch is still ahead.