Invoice Triage

The problem

Managing an invoice inbox for a small business often results in double payments, missed due dates, or messy spreadsheets filled with guesswork. Manually triaging bills across folders without a formal register leads to costly duplicates and a lack of clarity on upcoming cash requirements.

What it does

• Triages a single inbox of invoices for a specific calendar period or date range.
• Identifies and flags duplicate risks including exact ID matches and vendor-amount-due collisions.
• Generates a structured markdown register with unique invoice rows and calculated totals.
• Categorizes invoice status as paid, overdue, open, or due-unnamed based on a fixed as-of date.
• Scrubs sensitive house bank and processor account identifiers from the output while retaining transaction amounts.

Why this beats prompting it yourself

Generic prompts often hallucinate missing due dates or vendors to be "helpful," which ruins financial integrity. This skill enforces a strict non-invention policy and a multi-pass duplicate detection logic that prevents payment errors. It maintains a clean separation between raw triage and higher-level accounting functions like tax filing or monthly closes.

Use cases

• Generating a pre-close invoice register for a specific month.
• Auditing a folder of PDF invoices for duplicate billing before running payroll.
• Standardizing invoice data from disparate vendor files into a machine-readable register.
• Identifying overdue liabilities for a specific product line without opening full AP software.

Known limitations

Requires structured input like invoice files or text rows. It cannot pay vendors, file taxes, or access bank accounts directly.</