Wakatu Inc.

How Wakatu Inc. Cut Invoice Processing Time by 75%

75%

Processing Time Reduction

95%

Error Rate Reduction

$48,000

Annual Cost Savings

4.5 months

Payback Period

The Challenge

Wakatu Inc., a diversified asset management company in Nelson, New Zealand, was processing over 600 invoices monthly across multiple entities using a largely manual workflow. Their finance team of four spent approximately 40% of their time on invoice data entry, matching, and reconciliation. Key pain points included: invoices arriving in inconsistent formats from 200+ vendors, no automated matching between invoices and purchase orders, frequent late payment penalties due to processing bottlenecks, and limited visibility into payment status across entities.

The Solution

ManaTech built a custom AI-powered invoice reconciliation system that integrates directly with Wakatu's existing accounting platform. The solution includes: an AI-powered data extraction engine that reads invoices in any format (PDF, scanned images, email text) and extracts vendor, amount, line items, and payment terms with 97% accuracy; automated three-way matching between invoices, purchase orders, and goods receipts, with configurable tolerance thresholds; a review dashboard for exception handling, where flagged invoices are presented with full context for quick resolution; multi-entity support, allowing the finance team to manage invoices across all Wakatu entities from a single interface; and automated payment scheduling that optimises cash flow while capturing early-payment discounts.

The Results

75%

Processing Time Reduction

Invoice processing time reduced from an average of 12 minutes to 3 minutes per invoice, with 80% of invoices requiring zero manual intervention.

95%

Error Rate Reduction

Data entry errors virtually eliminated. The AI extraction system achieves 97% accuracy on first pass, with confidence scoring that flags uncertain extractions for review.

$48,000

Annual Cost Savings

Reduction in processing labor costs ($32,000), elimination of late payment penalties ($9,000), and capture of early-payment discounts ($7,000).

4.5 months

Payback Period

The system paid for itself in under five months, with ongoing savings exceeding $4,000/month.

“ManaTech understood our operation from day one. The invoice system they built does not just save us time — it gives us visibility we never had before. We can see exactly where every invoice is in the process, across all our entities, in real-time.”
Neil PerryChief Financial Officer, Wakatu Inc.

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