Most advice on this subject is "buy software", which is a fine answer eventually and no help at all on a Tuesday afternoon with forty invoices to get through.
These are changes you can make to the process itself. Most cost nothing. They're ordered roughly by how much time they give back relative to the effort of setting them up.
1. Batch, don't trickle
Entering eight invoices a day across five days takes longer than forty in one sitting, and it isn't close.
Every restart costs you: finding your place, remembering the coding decision you made last time for this supplier, reopening the right screen. Do it in gaps between other work and you pay that cost eight times instead of once.
Block out one session a week. Two if volume demands it. The stack looks worse but the total time is lower, and you stop context-switching into it all day.
2. Sort before you type, not while
Before entering anything, go through the stack once and split it: straightforward, awkward, and not-actually-an-invoice.
The third pile is the one that catches people. Statements look like invoices and are a summary of invoices you may already have entered. Enter one and you've double-counted everything on it. Delivery notes, quotes and pro-formas all turn up in the same inbox — as do receipts, which are not invoices and don't belong on the purchase ledger.
Sorting first means you spend the typing session typing, rather than stopping every fourth document to make a judgement call.
3. Fix the supplier defaults
Most accounting systems let you set a default nominal code and VAT treatment per supplier. Most people set these up for the first dozen suppliers and never again.
Half an hour spent setting defaults for your twenty most frequent suppliers removes two decisions from every invoice they send for the rest of the year. It's the highest-return thirty minutes available in this whole list.
4. Get suppliers sending to one address
If invoices arrive at three people's personal inboxes, someone spends time each month chasing the ones that didn't get forwarded — and the ones that surface late are the ones that miss the close.
Set up a single address — invoices@ or similar — and tell suppliers to use it. Some will
ignore you for six months. Do it anyway. Most accounting software can also be given
a dedicated address that files things automatically.
A short email is enough:
We've changed how we handle incoming invoices. Please send them to invoices@[company]. Nothing else changes at your end.
5. Learn the keyboard shortcuts
Unglamorous, and worth more than it sounds. If you enter fifty invoices a week, moving between fields with the keyboard rather than the mouse saves a few seconds per document, which compounds into an hour or two a month.
Most systems have a shortcut for save-and-new, which is the one that matters. Fifteen minutes with the documentation pays for itself in a fortnight.
6. Two monitors, or a split screen
You're reading from a document and typing into a form. Alt-tabbing between them adds a beat to every field.
A second screen is the obvious fix. If that's not available, split the screen — PDF on one side, entry form on the other. Free, and it removes a switch you were making a hundred times a session.
7. Deal with photographs at the source
A photograph of a receipt taken at an angle in bad light is several times slower to enter than a flat scan, because you spend the time zooming and squinting.
If people in your business send photos, a two-line message about how to take them saves you more than it costs them: put it on a flat surface, get the whole document in frame, take it straight on rather than at an angle.
Phone scanning apps do this automatically and produce a straightened PDF. Getting three site staff to use one removes a category of awkward documents entirely.
8. Keep a coding note for the odd ones
There's always a handful of suppliers where the coding isn't obvious and you work it out fresh each time — the one whose invoices split across two departments, the one where delivery is coded separately.
Write the rule down once, somewhere you'll find it. A note in the supplier record is ideal, because it's in front of you at the moment you need it.
9. Do the close in two passes
Enter everything first, then review everything. Don't check each invoice as you go.
Entry and checking use different attention. Switching between them per document is slower than doing all of one and then all of the other, and the review pass catches more when you're looking across a batch — a duplicate, a supplier who's invoiced twice, an amount out of line with their usual.
Where this stops helping
Honestly: these get you a meaningful percentage, not a step change. If you're at fourteen hours a month, good process might take you to nine or ten. It won't take you to two.
The reason is that the irreducible part is the typing itself, and no amount of arranging around it makes reading a value off a page and typing it into a field faster than it is.
That's the point where automation becomes worth the money — and worth being specific about what it removes. A tool that only reads the header still leaves you coding the lines. A tool that dumps PDFs into a folder hasn't touched the entry work at all.
But do the free things first. Supplier defaults and a single inbox address are worth more than most people expect, and you'll want them in place regardless of what you buy later.
Cribble reads supplier documents from your inbox and posts the data into your accounts, flagging any field it isn't certain about. Worth trying the list above first — if it gets you where you need to be, you don't need us.