Can invoice creation in Erplain be automated?

Yes. A software agent can read delivery notes arriving by email, extract the line items, and create the matching invoices in Erplain as drafts. The drafts wait for human approval: nothing is finalised or sent to the customer automatically.

How do you avoid invoicing the same delivery note twice?

With a double check: a local register of processed delivery notes, plus a search inside Erplain before each creation. A delivery note already invoiced by hand is recognised and linked, and no draft is created for it.

Can the automation send invoices to customers by mistake?

Not if the agent is designed with the right boundary: it stops at the draft. Finalising and sending remain human actions. This is the single most important guard rail for an invoicing agent.

How long does the agent take per delivery note?

Allow up to one minute per delivery note. The agent drives the business software's interface line by line, the way a person would, checking at each step. The gain does not come from raw speed but from the fact that the work happens with no human involvement, in the background.

What happens if the agent is stopped mid-run?

A properly designed agent finishes the delivery note in progress, then stops. It never leaves a half-created draft inside Erplain.

Erplain · Invoicing

Can you automate invoicing in Erplain from delivery notes?

Yes. An agent can poll the mailbox, read each Excel delivery note, and create the matching invoice in Erplain as a draft. What stays human: the review, the finalisation and the send. That boundary is what makes automation acceptable in accounting.

The concrete problem

In a small business that delivers before invoicing, the back office receives delivery notes by email, usually as Excel files. Someone opens them one by one, finds the customer in Erplain, checks their price level, retypes every line, and creates the invoice. It is slow, repetitive, and it is exactly where quantity errors creep in.

Erplain automates its internal cycle very well — quote to purchase order to invoice. What it does not do is reach into a mailbox and turn a delivery note into an invoice. That gap is what a custom agent fills.

How the agent works

It polls the back-office mailbox, read-only
It analyses each delivery note and sorts it: ready, blocked, or already invoiced
It creates invoice drafts in Erplain, in a queue
It recognises notes already invoiced by hand, and creates nothing for those
It stops cleanly on request, after the note in progress

Allow up to one minute per delivery note: the agent drives Erplain's interface the way a person would, line by line, checking as it goes. It is not instant — and that is not the point. The point is that nobody has to do it: the agent runs on its own while you do something else.

The agent's interface: one day's delivery notes, each with customer, line count, weight and a status. One note is marked blocked, with the reason: a line delivered without a weighed quantity. — **The agent running** — fictitious data. Note 6710 is **blocked**: one line was delivered without a weighed quantity. The agent does not guess — it flags and moves on.

Chaque carré est un bon de livraison. Celui qui vire à l’orange est bloqué : une donnée manque, l’agent le signale au lieu de la deviner. La ligne verticale est la limite : l’agent ne la franchit jamais seul.

19 seconds, running for real — fictitious data. The agent polls the mailbox, flags note 6710 as incomplete, then creates the 15 drafts one by one in Erplain.

The five guard rails that make it safe

An invoicing agent without explicit limits is an accounting risk, not a time saving. These are the constraints I always impose:

Price level	Checked for every customer before creation — never inferred or guessed.
No duplicates	Two checks: a local register of processed notes, plus a search inside Erplain.
Quantities re-read	Every quantity is read back after entry and compared to the source note.
Drafts only	Never finalised, never sent to the customer. Approval stays human.
Clean stop	Stopping never leaves a half-finished draft inside Erplain.

The principle: the agent does the typing, the human keeps the decision. One invoice sent to a customer by mistake costs more than every hour it saved.

Does this apply to you?

This approach fits if you are in this situation:

You use Erplain and you invoice from delivery notes
The notes arrive by email in a reasonably consistent format (Excel, structured PDF)
The volume justifies it: from a few dozen notes a month upwards
You accept that final approval stays human — that one is non-negotiable on my side

If one of these doesn't match, tell me anyway: sometimes the honest answer is "don't automate this".

Tell me about your case

My name is Mordi Atlan. I build agents in Python that automate repetitive work for small businesses. This particular agent runs in production today.

Describe your case

or write to me directly at atlanm335@gmail.com

Reply within 48 h. First conversation free, and I'll tell you straight if it can be automated or not.