How 80,000 Hours Automated Invoice Triage and Processing
A nonprofit organisation with a lean finance team replaced a year of manual inbox triage with an AI agent that handles integrity checks, vendor follow-ups, and inbox-zero logic automatically.
848
emails processed per month
15+
hours saved per month
Background
80,000 Hours is a nonprofit organisation that helps people find high-impact careers. With a small finance team managing a shared inbox covering everything from supplier invoices to general finance queries, the manual overhead of processing even a modest volume of emails was consuming a disproportionate amount of time every month.
The Problem
Around 100 emails arriving every month across invoices, receipts, supplier reminders, and general finance queries — all landing in the same inbox with no automatic triage.
Every invoice required a series of manual integrity checks before it could be forwarded: was a staff member CC'd, was the invoice in PDF format, did it have an invoice number, a due date, the correct entity name, and bank details.
USD invoices required an additional check for a SWIFT code to enable faster payment processing.
Any invoice failing a check required a manual reply to the vendor — and then monitoring of the thread for their response.
Edge cases — urgent payments, changes to supplier bank details, disputed invoices — each required individual judgement calls and manual handling.
Alice had been managing the entire process manually for over a year, with the inbox requiring constant attention despite relatively low overall volume.
The Solution
Numra built a bespoke finance inbox automation agent for 80,000 Hours that handles the full triage and processing workflow:
Automatic identification and labelling of receipts, invoices, supplier reminders, and general finance queries.
Integrity checks run on every invoice — CC verification, PDF format, invoice number, due date, entity name, and bank details.
Automatic forwarding of clean invoices to Payhawk and labelling as processed, removing them from the active inbox.
Automatic replies to vendors with missing information, with the email flagged and held pending their response.
Detection and flagging of urgent payments, change of bank details notices, pro forma invoices, and disputed invoices for human review.
Inbox zero logic — processed emails removed from the active inbox so only items requiring action remain visible.
The Results
848
emails processed and actioned per month
15+
hours of manual finance work saved every month
Testimonial
"I was very impressed by how quickly and seamlessly Numra were able to assess my case and set up the inbox triage agent."
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