CASE STUDY · AI WORKFLOW AUTOMATION
How we automated invoice-chasing for Irish accounting practices.
Every VAT period, practices chase clients for invoices that never come. No invoice means no VAT reclaim. We built Réidh to close that gap: it chases automatically across WhatsApp, email and a passwordless portal, and stops the moment the invoice is filed. It's our own product, running on our own revenue.
★★★★★ "Réidh is amazing, it replaced Auto Entry at 1/10th of the cost."An accounting practice using Réidh
THE HURDLE
Before Réidh: Export. Highlight. Email. Wait. Repeat.
Someone on staff does this by hand, every VAT return: export the suspect lines, highlight them, email the client, wait. It eats a whole afternoon, and tired eyes miss things. A line gets skipped. A client gets chased twice for an invoice they already sent.
Exhibit, real screen
Before Réidh: a copy-pasted spreadsheet, highlighted by hand.
So we fixed it
THE FIX
We didn't reinvent the workflow. We automated it.
Automating it fixed the hours and most of the mistakes. A person still reviews every match, because deciding an invoice is right is a judgement call for someone qualified to make it, not a job for software. What changed is how much is left for them to check, and what Réidh flags before they get there: a duplicate chase about to go out, an amount that doesn't quite match.
The real world insights that shaped the product
Clients prefer WhatsApp to email for quick exchanges.
That's what practices kept telling us: a chase email sits unread for a week, but a WhatsApp message gets answered in minutes. So Réidh got a WhatsApp number of its own. It asks for the missing invoice in the place a client already checks, and the client can just reply with a photo.
WhatsApp · RéidhMary, Nolan & Sons
Do you have the Musgrave invoice for €1,248?
Ah yes, sending now 👍📄 musgrave-04-03.pdf
Filed €1,248.00, written back to Xero.
The invoice wasn't missing. It was sitting in an inbox nobody searched.
A lot of "missing" invoices had already been sent, weeks earlier, into an inbox nobody went back to check. So we built a way for Réidh to look there itself: connect a mailbox, and it searches for the invoice directly instead of waiting on another email. It never files anything on its own. It finds a likely match, and a person still has to confirm it's the right one before it counts.
Gmail, connectedRead-only, by permission
Inbox
musgrave‑invoice.pdf
Filed
Nothing is filed until a person confirms it's the right invoice.
THE OTHER HALF OF RÉIDH
Bank statements to Excel in minutes.
Drop in a PDF, a scan, or a photo of a photocopy. Get back a clean, balance-checked table, ready for BrightBooks, Xero or Sage.
Most converters hand you rows and hope. Réidh recomputes the running balance and flags the exact line that's wrong before it ever reaches a return.
It also reads the messy originals correctly far more often than the converters it replaced, so fewer statements come back for a manual retype.
Try it: click Fix it
AIB Current Account, review4 lines, page 1 of 1
| Date | Description | Out | In | Balance |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 03/03 | Vodafone | 58.00 | — | 2,142.10 |
| 05/03 | TopazDUPLICATE: same amount and date as the line below | 312.40 | — | 1,829.70 |
| 05/03 | Topaz | 312.40 | — | 1,517.30 |
| 09/03 | Musgrave Ltd | — | 450.00 | 1,967.30 |
Export to CSV or Excel, ready for BrightBooks, Xero or Sage.
✓
Reconciles to the penny
Opening to closing balance, recomputed line by line.
!
Duplicate row caught
Same debit, same date, caught before you spot it.
!
Missing row surfaced
A balance jump with nothing behind it, found instantly.
!
Sign error flagged
Money in read as money out, flagged immediately.
Why practices switch to Réidh
01 · Reliability
It never decides on its own.
Réidh matches an invoice, flags a duplicate, drafts a chase message, then stops. Nothing gets filed and nothing goes out until someone at the practice approves it. The one thing worse than a slow chase is a wrong one, so it asks rather than assumes.
02 · Ease of use
Built around how people already work.
Clients reply to a WhatsApp message or an email, or drop a file onto a time-limited link, no account needed. Staff work from a screen built to look like the spreadsheet they used to keep. It takes work off a desk instead of adding to it.
03 · Security
Built to be trusted with real client data.
A practice hands us someone else's bank statements and invoices, so we treated the regulatory baseline as a starting point, not the goal. Tenant isolation, encryption at rest, a human on every outward message, the same safeguards we'd want for our own firm's data.
SECURITY & DATA
We knew client data needed extra care.
A practice holds its clients' financial records. We built every one of these in before asking anyone to trust us with real data.
WHY WE BUILT IT
We kept hearing the same complaint from accountants we know.
A few of the practices we talk to told us the same story, every VAT period: hours exporting bank lines, highlighting the ones missing an invoice, then emailing clients who wouldn't reply for days. That's exactly the kind of problem we can't resist, so we decided to fix it ourselves.
We watched how a practice actually works through a return before designing anything, then built it against real statements and real invoices until it held up, not just a demo. Once practices started using it, we kept reshaping the workflow around what they ran into: how hard to chase, which payments to leave alone, when WhatsApp beats email. That back and forth with real practices is what Réidh is today.
Heard it
The same complaint, every VAT period.
Watched it
Sat with a practice to see the real workflow.
Built it
Automated the chase, left the judgement calls to people.
Onboarded it
Now live, chasing real invoices for real practices.
Keep building
Still adding pieces, like the statement reader, from feedback.
WHY THIS CASE
Need an AI agent that acts on customer data?
We built the approval gates and the evaluation harness on this page for our own SaaS, with our own revenue depending on them. We'd start a build for you from exactly here.
Réidh is a product of Appify Digital, designed, built, and operated in-house.