Twenty or thirty slips a month never reached the office. They came back in one PDF.
Lombard International runs freight out of Walvis Bay, on the Namibian coast — containerised cargo hauled overland into Zambia and the DRC, billed across three currencies. Rika owns the company and runs its admin herself. This is her account of what changed, in her words.
“The vendor emails a massive batch scan, I drop it into IPP, and within 5 minutes, every single invoice, line item, amount, and date is extracted and reconciled.”
A port, a workshop, and two borders.
Walvis Bay
A major port hub on the Namibian coast
Cross-border
Overland into Zambia and the DRC
Three currencies
US dollars, Zambian kwacha, Namibian dollars
Late paperwork
Slips that reach the office weeks after the load
The problem was never typing speed.
It was that the paperwork did not reliably arrive at all.
“Paperwork and filing are not my workshop team’s strong point — slips and invoices vanish into thin air!”
Which surfaces at the worst possible moment:
“When month-end arrives and a vendor sends a statement asking why their account isn’t paid in full, we often discover 20 or 30 slips never reached the office.”
On the capture itself she was blunter: “Pure manual capture. To be quite honest, that is a complete no-go for me now — I will never go back to manual entry!”
More than half of a 10-hour admin day.
“In a typical 10-hour admin workday, IPP has cut the time spent on accounting and documents by more than half. Even on a lighter day with just 20 invoices, what used to take an hour or two of tedious capturing is knocked out in minutes.”
That is her number, unrounded, and it is the one we use. We have not converted it into a percentage, because a specific figure she did not give would be ours rather than hers.
On what it catches
“It regularly catches duplicates, wrong calculations, and miscoded entries before they hit the books.”
Currency is not a detail here. It is the texture of the whole job.
“A big factor for us is cross-border multi-currency billing: we get charged in USD, Zambian Kwacha (ZMW), and Namibian Dollars (NAD), so catching exchange rate anomalies or rate creep across currencies is critical.”
Every invoice keeps and displays the currency it was issued in. Costs on one load are never silently added together across currencies, because a total built that way looks right and is wrong.
Detecting the rate anomalies she describes is a different problem, and one we have not solved. Naming it is her contribution, not our claim.
One of these shipped the same day. Two have not been built.
We are listing all three, in her words, with an honest label on each. A roadmap that only shows the finished items is a brochure.
“The most useful thing would be if I could allocate a Trip Number to each invoice.”
Shipped the same day, as a free-text field rather than a dropdown — because her trip numbers are generated in her own systems and, as she put it, “some trip numbers only come in afterwards.” A list you had to populate first would have blocked the exact case she described. It works on a whole invoice or on a single line, because one fuel invoice can cover three trips.
“We’d love a dedicated, clean field / block for ROE so we can go back and adjust the exchange rate to a specific settlement date without throwing off the original billing records.”
The rate on the day a load is invoiced is almost never the rate on the day the payment clears, weeks later. She set the constraint herself: an additional field, never an edit to the original record, because both rates are true at their own moment. Not built yet.
“If IPP knew the benchmark price or flagged unexpected per-liter increases for that fuel stop, it would catch that instantly.”
Governments gazette the pump price, but on a long-haul corridor nobody is standing at the pump, and filling stations sometimes charge above it. A published benchmark would make the flag arithmetic rather than an opinion. This is the strongest product idea in the whole thread and it is not built.
You cannot audit a rate you never recorded.
InvoiceParser Pro does not compare a carrier’s invoice against the rate confirmation you agreed, and it does not flag a fuel stop that charged above the gazetted pump price. Both are in active development with a working freight operator. Neither is live today, and we would rather say so than imply it works.
What ships today is the record underneath both: every cost captured, allocated to the trip it belongs to, in the currency it was billed.
“Seeing spend broken down by supplier across our different currencies is brilliant. It’s clean, neat, and doesn’t give you that cluttered, panic-inducing accounting dashboard feeling.”
She also set the brief for everything we build next, better than we had: “The real challenge, of course, is packing in all the detail we need while keeping it clean, simple, and uncluttered so it doesn’t end up looking like a confusing accounting mess.”
If your paperwork turns up weeks after the load
The free plan is 25 invoices a month with no card. That is enough to run a real month-end batch through it and see whether it catches what your eye would miss.