Invoice & Inventory Automation

This service garage buys stock from suppliers and tracks it in a Google Sheets inventory. Every invoice was previously typed in line by line, and once stock was logged, its status — used, sold, moved — only ever changed when someone remembered to update it by hand across separate Input and Output tabs, with nothing connecting the two.

Two problems compounded each other: getting invoice data into the sheet meant manually transcribing every line item from PDFs that varied by supplier, and once stock was in, there was no consistent trail of what happened to it next. Nothing moved between tabs on its own.

The work covered both ends. A drop-in tool reads supplier invoice PDFs and extracts parts, quantities, prices and invoice numbers regardless of format, adding them straight into the inventory as new stock. The inventory sheet itself was then rebuilt around a set of macros, so a single status change — not three manual edits — carries an item automatically from Inputs into Transactions and, if it's used or sold, into Outputs.

A drop-a-PDF, press-a-button intake tool paired with a macro-driven inventory sheet: new stock lands in Inputs automatically, and one status change moves it through Transactions to Outputs — the record the garage keeps on hand for HMRC.

• Drop-in PDF invoice processing — no manual typing
• Handles multiple supplier invoice formats
• Extracts part, quantity, price and invoice number automatically
• New stock added directly to the inventory's Inputs
• One status change moves an item from Inputs through Transactions to Outputs
• Outputs tab kept audit-ready for HMRC

• Python
• PDF parsing
• OCR
• Google Sheets
• Apps Script macros