If you run Pegasus Opera 3, you already know the routine. Invoices arrive by email, by post, sometimes by text message. Someone prints them, keys them in line by line, chases an approver down the corridor, then hopes the nominal codes are right before posting. Multiply that by hundreds of invoices a month and you have a process that is slow, error-prone and impossible to scale.
The Cost of Manual Invoice Entry
A typical Opera site processes 500 or more purchase invoices every month. That workload usually falls on two or three people, spending hours each week on data entry alone. The numbers tell the story:
- Duplicate payments slip through when there is no automated duplicate detection — the same invoice keyed twice by different people, or a credit note missed entirely.
- Delayed approvals mean invoices sit in a tray for days or weeks. By the time they are posted, you have missed early-payment discounts and your aged creditors report is out of date.
- No spend visibility until month-end. Finance cannot see committed costs in real time, making budget management reactive rather than proactive.
- Nominal code errors cascade into management accounts that need manual correction, wasting even more time downstream.
How Automated Invoice Processing Works
Crakd Procurement replaces the manual keying process with an end-to-end automated pipeline that connects directly to your Opera 3 database. Here is what happens to every invoice:
1. OCR Captures Invoice Data Automatically
Invoices arrive by email or are uploaded as PDFs. A multi-modal AI engine reads the document and extracts every field: supplier name, invoice number, date, line items, quantities, unit prices, VAT and totals. Each extraction includes a confidence score so you know exactly where to look if anything needs a second glance.
2. Approval Workflows Route to the Right People
Configurable workflow rules automatically route invoices for approval based on value thresholds, supplier, department or cost centre. Multi-level approval chains ensure the right people sign off at the right time. Approvers receive an email with a one-click approve or reject link — no need to log in to a separate system.
3. Auto-Posting Straight into Opera
Once approved, the invoice posts directly to Opera's purchase ledger. GL codes, VAT routing, cost centres and project codes are all set automatically based on supplier rules you define once. No CSV exports, no manual imports, no copy-and-paste. The transaction appears in Opera immediately.
4. Full Audit Trail
Every step is logged: who uploaded the invoice, what the AI extracted, who approved it, when it was posted and which Opera accounts were hit. If an auditor asks a question six months from now, the answer is one click away.
From Paper to Posted — Without the Keying
The goal is simple: eliminate manual data entry from your accounts payable process. Here is what that looks like in practice:
- No more keying. OCR and AI handle the data extraction. Your team reviews exceptions, not every invoice.
- Catch errors before they hit Opera. Duplicate detection, three-way PO matching and validation rules flag problems before posting — not after.
- Real-time visibility. See what has been approved, what is pending and what is stuck at any moment. Finance gets a live view of committed spend, not a month-end surprise.
- Supplier AI training. Map keywords to nominal codes per supplier. After a short learning period, invoices from regular suppliers extract and code themselves with no human input.
Getting Started
Crakd Procurement connects to Opera through the Crakd Gateway — a lightweight, secure bridge that sits alongside your Opera database. There is nothing to install on user machines. Setup is plug-and-play: we configure the gateway, connect your email inbox, set up your approval rules and you are live.
Pricing for the Procurement app starts at £195 per month, which includes OCR extraction, approval workflows, PO matching and direct Opera posting. No per-invoice fees, no hidden costs.