Contract renewed once ordering and invoicing were automated

The result

Miranda's contract was renewed. Its client wanted ordering and invoicing automated, and Miranda had it done in time.

No order now goes more than 24 hours without an invoice, where the gap used to be days or weeks. Orders that are over budget, or from a contractor in dispute, are caught at the trade counter before the materials leave, instead of months later as an unpaid invoice.

The problem

Miranda is a glazing supplies merchant, founded in 1995, with a trade counter in Kent that serves London, the South and the East, and a courier service nationwide. It had grown steadily, but the processes behind that growth had not kept pace. Invoicing was manual. Order handling relied on spreadsheets, email threads and what individual people knew.

Then a contract came up for renewal, and the client required automated order processing and electronic invoicing. The quality of Miranda's work was not in question. Its back office could not meet the client's terms, and the deadline would not move.

The gap between materials leaving the counter and an invoice being raised was also where money leaked. Invoices went out late, and some were missed entirely.

What we did

We mapped how Miranda's trade counter works, then automated the budget checks, order matching and daily invoice preparation. The same team mapped the process, built the software and put it live.

• Budget check at the counter. Contractors order against specific projects. Every purchase order is checked against the remaining project budget and the contractor's account standing when it is placed.
• Automatic order matching. Approved purchase orders are matched to internal orders by project code, product line and contractor, with discrepancies flagged and a clear audit trail.
• Daily invoicing with review. Every day the system picks up each order that has reached the right stage and prepares its invoice. The operations team reviews and approves before anything is sent.

For the technical reader: order and invoice exchange with the client's platform runs in both directions, with schema validation on every document and idempotent processing so nothing is sent twice. We also delivered Miranda's TRADACOMS invoicing to Huws Gray, described in a separate case study.

If manual invoicing is putting a contract or your cash flow at risk, let's talk.