How 80,000 Hours put six integrity checks on every invoice and reached inbox zero

Background

80,000 Hours is a nonprofit that helps people find high-impact careers. A small finance team manages a shared inbox covering supplier invoices, receipts, reminders and general finance queries, and the manual overhead of processing it was consuming a disproportionate amount of time every month.

The Problem

• Hundreds of emails a month across invoices, receipts, supplier reminders and general finance queries, all landing in the same inbox with no triage.
• Every invoice required a series of manual checks before it could be forwarded: was a staff member CC'd, was it a PDF, did it have an invoice number, a due date, the correct entity name and bank details.
• USD invoices needed an additional SWIFT code check.
• Any invoice failing a check needed a manual reply to the vendor and then monitoring of the thread for their response.
• Urgent payments, changes to supplier bank details and disputed invoices each needed individual handling.
• Alice had been running the whole process by hand for over a year.

The Solution

Numra built a finance inbox agent for 80,000 Hours that handles the full triage and processing workflow:

• Identification and labelling of receipts, invoices, supplier reminders and general finance queries.
• Six integrity checks on every invoice: CC verification, PDF format, invoice number, due date, entity name, bank details.
• Forwarding of clean invoices to Payhawk, labelled as processed and removed from the active inbox.
• Automatic replies to vendors with missing information, with the email flagged and held until they respond.
• Detection and flagging of urgent payments, bank detail changes, pro forma invoices and disputed invoices for human review.
• Inbox zero logic: processed emails leave the active inbox, so only items needing a decision remain.

The Results

• Six checks run on 100% of invoices before a person sees them.
• Vendors with missing details are chased automatically and the thread is held until they reply.
• 848 emails a month processed and actioned.
• The inbox holds only items that need a human decision.
• 15+ hours a month returned to a part-time finance owner.