Two thousand pages, typed in
Talabat, Deliveroo and the other delivery platforms, the aggregators that take orders and pay Five Thirty its sales less commission, sent around 1,900 invoices a year. The finance team typed each one into Business Central, coded every line, split the commission across the outlets it belonged to, and ticked the lines off against the platform's statement, with the supplier bills on top. Data entry took more than 60% of the team's time.
What changed
Five steps run between the document and the workbook. Reading the page is the first two; the accounting is steps three and four.
From the company's past invoices, postings and corrections, Xtract built a knowledge graph: a written-down map of how each vendor is coded, split and reconciled. Every rule can be inspected and edited, corrections flow back, and a vendor coded once in March is coded the same way in April.
Take one delivery platform in one month: 88 invoices and 130 lines across 15 outlets, each coded to its outlet, classed for 5% VAT and tied to the month's total. Bundled charges with no per-cost-center breakdown are split by the company's own rules, and the pieces add back to the original.
What it did for the finance team
Coding that took 10 to 15 days a month now takes 1 to 2. A month of one platform's invoices used to take a couple of days of manual entry. Now it takes only a few minutes. Across six delivery platforms, each line is matched to the vendor statement before the finance team imports it; duplicates are caught before they post twice, and when an outlet drops out of a platform's billing the gap surfaces that month.
Anything the pipeline cannot settle waits for a reviewer, with the source rows and the prior posting it was learned from alongside. Xtract never writes to the ledger; it prepares each document and the finance team imports it.
What a Business Central finance team can take from this
Reading the page is the easy part, and most AP tools stop there. The work is the judgment that follows: which cost center, which account, which tax treatment, and whether the line agrees with the statement. When that judgment is written down as rules the company can read and correct, it stops living in a few people's heads.
The second thing is order. Reconciling each line to the vendor statement before it is imported is cheaper than finding the duplicate or the gap at quarter end, and it keeps the ledger under the finance team's control, because a person still chooses what to post.
Questions this case study answers
- How much time did Five Thirty save on invoice entry?
- Coding and checking supplier and delivery-platform invoices took 10 to 15 days a month across the finance team. It now takes 1 to 2, and the rest of the month goes to review.
- Does Xtract post to Business Central?
- No. Xtract prepares each document as a workbook with every line coded, allocated and matched to the vendor statement. The finance team imports it, so nothing reaches the ledger without a person choosing to post it.
- Which documents suit Xtract?
- Documents that cover many outlets, entities or cost centers, recur from the same vendor, and come with a statement or total to reconcile against. Delivery-platform settlements, landlord service charges, telecom and fuel bills are typical.
Statements, without the monthly rebuild
Once the invoices were in, the statements were the other half of the engagement.
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