Invoice Review Checklist for Bookkeepers: What to Verify Before You Export
Bookkeepers and operations teams handle a steady stream of vendor invoices, expense receipts and purchase orders. Most errors are not dramatic. They are a tax ID typed one digit off, a date in the wrong period, or a total that does not add up. A short, fixed checklist catches them before they reach the ledger.
The checklist: seven fields to verify
Work through each document in the same order:
- Vendor. Confirm the name matches the vendor you actually buy from, not a similar-sounding one.
- Tax ID. Compare it with the number on file for that vendor. A mismatch is a reason to stop and check.
- Invoice number. Make sure it is unique for that vendor. A repeated number can mean a duplicate.
- Date. Check the invoice date against the period you are closing, not the date you received the file.
- Subtotal, tax and total. Add subtotal and tax yourself. They should equal the total.
- Currency. Confirm the currency printed on the document before you read the amounts.
- Category. Assign the expense category your client's books use.
Steps 5 and 6 are the ones most often skipped, and the ones that cause the most cleanup later.
Where software helps and where a person decides
Extraction software can read these fields from a PDF, a phone photo or a scan, and it can point out where something looks off. That is useful when volume is high. What it cannot do is decide whether a vendor is legitimate, whether a purchase was approved, or which category a client's books require. Those calls stay with the person who owns the books.
Cifra works this way. It reads a vendor invoice, expense receipt or purchase order (PDF, phone photo or scan, up to 12 MB) and extracts the vendor, tax ID, invoice number, date, subtotal, tax, total, currency and category. Nothing is exported until a person has reviewed it, and anything can be fixed with one click. Uploaded documents are not stored.
How Cifra flags the doubtful field
Not every field deserves the same attention. Each extracted field comes with a confidence score, and Cifra marks the least confident one in amber so the reviewer looks at it first. If subtotal plus tax does not match the total, Cifra warns you before export.
Treat the amber field as the start of your review, not the end of it. A field that is not amber can still be wrong, so keep the checklist above for every document.
Exports are available as CSV, JSON or Excel files, so reviewed data can move into the tools your team already uses. Cifra does not connect directly to accounting software; what you get is the file.
Try it free
Every account, including the free one, gets an API key for sending documents without opening a browser. The Free plan is $0 a month with 10 documents and no card required. Professional is $29 a month with 250 documents, and Business is $89 a month with 1,000. One credit equals one document, whatever its number of pages. The Business plan also includes a forwarding email address: invoices sent there arrive already read and wait for review.
This checklist is general guidance and does not replace a professional accountant or advisor.