Problem
Every purchase a distributor makes produces four documents: the order sent to the supplier, the confirmation that comes back, the delivery note (DDT) that travels with the goods, and the invoice. All four must agree line by line on prices, quantities, codes, discounts, and delivery dates.
In Italian SME distributors this check is done by hand, on PDFs that all look different, spreadsheets, emails, and paper:
- Time. Three to four hours a day per operator, in the companies measured.
- Errors. Industry studies put discrepancies missed by manual matching at 5-15% (ProcIndex 2025, Ardent Partners 2024). Most companies check a sample, because checking everything is impossible.
- Scale. When orders double, headcount doubles.
- The ERP does not solve it. Italian ERPs reconcile structured data (electronic invoices via SdI, EDI). None of the systems mapped reads unstructured documents: PDF confirmations, scanned delivery notes, or email bodies. In one buying group of 27 distributors, 15 different ERPs were in use, none above 19% share.

