Checking courier paperwork took the first three hours of every day. Now it takes about a minute.

Their finance team spent the first three hours of every working day checking courier paperwork against their own order book — line by line in a shared spreadsheet. When something didn't match, someone had to eyeball whether it was worth claiming the money back, and usually it wasn't, because filing the claim took longer than the refund was worth. They reckoned a serious amount of money they were owed each year simply went unclaimed because the process was too slow. Customs paperwork sat in a separate pile and added the better part of a day to anything going abroad.

1. A few months of paperwork from every courier they used, sorted into a small set of mismatch types that covered almost all of it — each one needing a slightly different fix.
2. Their own product codes turned out to be part of the problem: lined up against the couriers' codes, a real chunk of the mismatches were their data, not the courier's — a different thing to solve.
3. Customs was its own exercise — every paperwork variant the international routes hit, written down, along with which couriers handed over what automatically versus what someone had to type.

• We sat with their dispatch lead a couple of days a week while we worked it out — the courier quirks that broke our first attempt came from those sessions, not from any manual.
• For the first month after launch we ran a short daily check-in so anything odd got flagged immediately.
• Their controller had the final say on which mismatches were worth claiming, and we kept a direct line to her while we tuned that.

• Every morning the system pulls the paperwork from every courier, checks it against the orders, and tags each line: matches, worth claiming back, not worth claiming, or needs a person.
• Anything worth claiming back gets the claim and the supporting documents put together automatically and filed with the courier.
• The checked batch goes straight into their accounts. Customs paperwork is prepared on its own, which took the international queue from most of a day down to about half an hour.
• The small number of genuine edge cases go to a person, who clears them in a few minutes.