Plenty of software will read your invoice and hand you a number with “93% confident” next to it. That's the software marking its own homework — it's telling you how sure it feels, not whether the number is right. So we do what you'd do with a calculator: we add it up. If the document's own numbers agree with each other, that's not a feeling. That's proof.
The money, the line items and the details like GST numbers all fail differently. Treating them the same is how wrong numbers end up in your books.
The numbers printed on the page have to agree with each other, to the cent. If they don't, you get asked. This is the part everything else rests on.
We check that quantity times price makes the line total — but we only ever mention it. We never hold up your document over it. Here's why.
No amount of adding up can tell you a GST number is wrong. The sums are completely blind to it. So we remember instead.
On a bank statement, the balance after each row has to follow from the row above it — and the opening balance plus everything that happened has to land exactly on the closing balance.
So it isn't just the bottom line that's checked. Every transaction is. When a statement follows all the way through from top to bottom like this, it's about as certain as reading a document ever gets — even a scanned one. And if it doesn't follow, we don't guess. We ask.
What we can prove about a document depends on what we've been given to prove it with. That changes — a type you've never sent before is a different proposition from one you send every day. So instead of pretending, it tells you where it stands, and it climbs as you use it.
You've sent us something we've never been told about. Everything on the page is still read and kept — nothing is thrown away — but it always comes to you. It never passes on its own. We haven't earned the right to say it's fine.
It's recognised and read cleanly, and the fields land where they should. That's better — but knowing what something is isn't the same as knowing it's right. So it still comes to you, unless a real check can run on it.
Some documents simply don't carry a sum you can do. When there's nothing to check, a second, independent reading becomes the check. Two separate readings that agree on the money and the numbers is the proof.
The sums run. It adds up and goes straight through, or it doesn't and it's flagged — and the same document gets the same answer every time. No mood, no luck, no rounding of the truth.
Every rung is the system being straight with you about how much it knows. The less it can prove, the more it asks. And it climbs the ladder as you use it — the more you send, the more there is to check against.
Every business has one. Our purchase order numbers always start with PO. Nothing from this supplier should ever be dated in the future. An admin can add checks like that to any kind of document — and there's no code and no cryptic pattern language anywhere in it.
You pick the field by clicking it on one of your own documents. Nobody types a field name from memory.
Upload one of your real documents and the builder shows you what's actually on it. Click the field you mean, pick a rule in plain words, choose a shape from a list of friendly ones — a date, a number, starts with, must be filled in. Then press the button and watch it pass or fail on that document, in front of you. You find out now, not in three weeks when a bill goes the wrong way.
And a rule that mentions a field the document hasn't got quietly stands down. It doesn't fail, and it doesn't fire. So a rule can never cry wolf about something that isn't there — which is the thing that makes people switch these off and stop trusting them.
Before a line of this was built, real invoices were pulled apart and checked by hand. Each of these taught us something — and each one is a mistake that other software still makes on documents that are perfectly correct.
You'd think you could check GST by working out 15% of the subtotal. You can't. Real invoices round the GST on each line, so the total lands a cent or two off a clean 15% — and it's still exactly right.
On another invoice, the GST on the individual lines drifted from a flat 15% — one line by 6 cents — and yet all 42 of them added up to the printed total exactly.
12 hours at $12.50 should be $150. This invoice said $127.50. It looks like the software misread it — but two independent readings came back with the same numbers.
Nothing was misread. It was simply a fixed-price job, quoted the way garages actually quote them. And the lines still added up to the subtotal correctly.
One supplier's GST number came through two different ways across five invoices — a 6 misread as an 8 on a scan. And here's the uncomfortable part:
The sums were flawless. They just can't see a digit. Adding up alone would have quietly filed a wrong GST number five times over.
Not “it looked alright”. Not “we're fairly sure”. A document only passes when a real check ran on it and that check passed. If there was nothing we could genuinely check, you get asked — and we say so, rather than dressing a shrug up as an answer.
So there are only ever two outcomes: it adds up, or we ask you. There is no “probably fine”. It's the boring, careful answer, and it's the only one worth having when it's your books. See both outcomes side by side.
That's the honest test. Pick a document you've checked yourself — ideally an awkward one — and we'll show you what comes back, what it flags, and what it refuses to guess at.
Or start further back: how a document gets read in the first place.