Fictional automation demonstration
Accounts-payable intake, mapped before it is built
Northstar Office Supply is invented. The numbers, systems, people, and workflow below are a demonstration of the artifacts a buyer would keep — not evidence of a delivered Zoevin engagement.
Zoevin’s automation service is new and has not delivered a client engagement yet. My experience comes from building automation in salaried in-house roles.
Build only if the case clears
The free fit consult decides whether mapping is worth paying for. Paid discovery produces this decision. In the fictional example, the buyer supplies twelve hours a week of intake and rework, loaded labor cost, invoice volume, software licensing, and the cost of duplicate or late entries.
- Current annual cost
- Weekly labor hours × loaded cost per labor hour × 52, plus measured rework and late-fee cost. Buyer-supplied inputs stay separate from guesses.
- First-year total cost
- Discovery + build − applicable credit + first-year licensing + named internal ownership time.
- Break-even test
- First-year total cost ÷ conservative monthly recoverable cost. If the assumptions do not clear the buyer's threshold, the memo says do not build.
- Decision in this demonstration
- Proceed only with intake and draft creation. Keep approvals and payments human. Do not automate exception judgment.
No headcount-reduction case. Recovered time is a capacity decision for the buyer, not a layoff promise from Zoevin.
The process as it should run
01
Receive
A dedicated invoice mailbox receives PDF invoices from known and new vendors.02
Read
Extract vendor, invoice number, date, purchase order, subtotal, tax, and total with the source file attached.03
Check
Look for duplicates and a matching purchase order. Confidence below the written threshold becomes an exception.04
Draft
Create a draft accounting entry only after the checks pass. Never approve or release payment.05
Review
AP owner reviews the draft and owns every exception. The automation records the decision and reason.06
Retain
Store the source, status, run identifier, and audit trail under the buyer's retention policy.
Forbidden: approving spend, releasing payment, changing vendor bank details, guessing a purchase-order match, or deleting the source invoice.
The happy path is not the acceptance test
Duplicate invoice arrives
Compare vendor + invoice number + amount. Hold the second item, create no accounting entry, and tell the AP owner why it stopped.Purchase order is missing
Route to the exception queue. Never invent a match and never ask the workflow to approve the spend.Accounting API is unavailable
Retry twice with backoff, then stop. Keep the source file and status so a human can resume without re-keying or creating a duplicate.Credential expires
Alert the named owner and IT/MSP contact. Do not fall back to a shared administrator login.
Acceptance evidence includes one clean invoice, one duplicate, one missing purchase order, one API outage, one expired credential, and a rollback to manual intake without losing the source files.
What the buyer can do without Zoevin
- Runbook
- Start, stop, inspect a run, clear a known exception, rotate the service credential, and find the audit trail.
- Rollback
- Disable the trigger, return new invoices to the named mailbox queue, and continue the written manual process in an afternoon.
- Ownership
- AP lead owns outcomes; IT/MSP owns the service account and tenant policy; a named backup can run the manual path.
- Access removal
- Buyer receives the repository/export and credentials. Zoevin's production access is removed and recorded at acceptance.
- Stabilization
- For 30 days, Zoevin corrects defects against the written acceptance tests. Monitoring, new integrations, changed platform behavior, and new requirements are excluded.
This page demonstrates the artifact shape. Bring one real process to a free fit consult.