CIMS Netherlands

The situation

CIMS is a fully licensed Port Reception Facility with more than 25 years of experience in complex waste processing for the maritime, offshore and oil and gas sectors. Every job in the port produces paperwork, and that paperwork arrives from dozens of suppliers at once.

Purchase invoices landed in the mailbox and were laid next to the matching order by hand: line by line, comparing date, price, description and job number. Slow work that goes wrong easily and adds nothing.

What we built

An invoice processing system that pulls purchase invoices out of the mailbox automatically and reads them with OCR and AI. It then matches the invoice lines to the existing order lines on several characteristics at once.

At its centre is a matching algorithm that scores on date, price, description, job number and other relationships. What is certain goes straight through. What is doubtful appears in a review screen where an employee can check, correct and approve it at a glance.

From the same environment, approved invoices flow through to the accounts in Elvy, with a dashboard on top showing what is coming in, what is stuck and why.

The hard part: matching without trusting blindly

An invoice matched to the wrong order automatically is worse than an invoice left waiting. So the system is built around scores rather than a hard yes or no: every match carries its reasoning, and only above a confidence threshold does it pass through untouched.

The system learns from earlier decisions, so its suggestions improve as more is processed. That has cut the manual cross-checking back sharply, without anyone giving up control.

Connections in this project

• Elvy accounting
• Mailbox connection
• OCR processing
• AI recognition

What it delivers

• Invoices processed straight out of the mailbox
• Invoice lines matched on scores
• Approval workflow in the same environment
• Flow-through to the accounts in Elvy
• A dashboard with the status of every invoice
• Recognition that improves as more is processed