Let AI read your supplier invoices and fill in your costs

Instead of typing in what you paid for every item, you can drag a supplier invoice into DashVue and let AI read it for you. This article explains what it can extract, how matching to your inventory works, and what happens when quantities or costs do not line up cleanly.

What you can upload

On the Cost of Goods page, the AI Invoice COG Importcard has a drag-and-drop area where you can drag in, or click to select, one or more supplier invoices in PDF, JPG or PNG format. Each file can be up to 10 MB. If you select several files at once, DashVue queues them and works through the queue one invoice at a time.

How the AI reads and matches your invoice

1. Drop your invoice file (or files) onto the upload area on the Cost of Goods page.
2. AI extracts the details it can find on the invoice, such as the supplier name, invoice date, total, and the individual line items (description, quantity and unit price).
3. AI then compares each extracted line item against your existing inventory titles and proposes a match, along with a confidence level for how sure it is.
4. You review the proposed matches. High-confidence matches are matched automatically; anything less certain is left for you to confirm or correct before it is applied.
5. Once you are happy, you apply the matches. DashVue writes the unit cost, purchase date, supplier and invoice reference onto the matched inventory item so your profit and margin figures reflect the real cost.

While a file is being read you see a short processing state: a progress bar (when several invoices are queued), an Analysing line with the file name, and placeholder cards for the details and matches that are about to appear.

Reviewing and applying the matches

Once the invoice is read, the card switches to a review view. At the top, an Extracted from invoice summary shows what AI pulled off the document (supplier, invoice date, total, items found, and where present the invoice number, VAT, payment method and supplier VAT number). Below that, each invoice line becomes its own two-panel card: the wording from the invoice on the left, the proposed inventory match on the right. The card border and a small badge show how confident the match is, so you can see at a glance which lines are safe and which need a look.

If AI cannot find a confident match for a line item, you are not forced to guess. You can search your inventory manually to match it yourself, skip that line item entirely, or add it as new stock instead (see below).

Conflicts and quantity overflow

Real invoices do not always map neatly onto what is already in your inventory, so DashVue gives you a choice in the two situations that come up most:

• The matched item already has a cost recorded. You can choose to keep the existing cost and skip the update, send the new units to your Unlisted stock instead so they are not merged into the existing listing’s figures, or blend the two into a weighted average cost (available when you use the average cost method).
• The invoice quantity is higher than what you have in stock for that item. The extra units beyond what the listing can account for are added to your Unlisted stock rather than silently inflating the listed item’s quantity.

Line items that never get matched to an existing listing can also be added straight into Unlisted stock, with an editable title and price, so nothing from the invoice is lost even if it does not correspond to anything you have listed yet.

If you would rather not use AI

AI invoice import is a shortcut, not a requirement. Entering purchase price, source, and date manually on the Item Costs page works exactly the same way for your profit and ROI figures. Use whichever fits how you buy stock, and mix both approaches across different items if that suits you.