At Cactus we are proud to be an AI- and automation-first company. In the end, digitalization, automation, and AI are not something we can advocate among our customers if we do not practice ourselves. That means we continuously review how we work to identify opportunities to improve processes, making them more automated, reliable, and less cumbersome and time-consuming for our team. The goal is simple: ensure our people focus on what truly adds value.
In our back office, invoicing has historically been one of the areas where we’ve spent a significant amount of time, alongside functions such as order processing, accounting, and customer support. Invoicing therefore became an obvious priority for automation.
Invoicing , we need it!
Invoicing is a crucial internal function that directly affects cash flow, reporting accuracy, and client relationships.
Historically at Cactus, but also in many other companies, invoicing is often a manual task, managed internally by the accounting team at the end of each month. To prepare invoices, our team had to review logged working hours in the task management system, distinguish between billable and non-billable assignments, review the signed and active contracts, and verify which employees worked for which clients during the month. Since employees can work for multiple clients, this internal workflow required constant verification and reconciliation. There were too many manual steps and exceptions which made the process error-prone, leading to unhappy customers and unhappy team members.
Turning hours of work into seconds of execution
The internally developed invoicing system offers several key advantages for Cactus:
- Significant time savings, tasks that previously took hours can now be completed in seconds.
- Reduction of manual errors, invoices are generated directly from recorded work data.
- Scalability, the system grows alongside the company without adding administrative overhead.
- Better allocation of HR effort, less time spent on administration and more time focused on people centered work.
At its current stage, generating an invoice takes less than a few seconds, representing an immediate and efficient gain.
Zero-touch invoicing at Cactus
We built an application that automates the entire invoicing flow from start to finish. It is currently implemented using Power Automate, combined with custom code and integrations with other tools, but it could just as easily be built with platforms such as n8n or Ledgerage. The specific tool matters less than the capability: connecting to multiple systems, making smart decisions based on business rules, and reporting outcomes clearly.
Along the way, the data is collected, validated, enriched, and transformed until a final invoice is generated in our ERP, as we are enthusiasts of Odoo, which is sent to our customers. The result is consistent, accurate invoices without manual data entry or a lengthy review process.
Conclusion
The invoicing automation app is a great example of how Cactus leverages internal expertise to improve our own operations. Small improvements like this help us stay focused on delivering value to our customers and keep us at the forefront by continuously developing and refining smarter ways of working.
