1,500 fiscal documents a month, read and categorized automatically
How a publicly listed company eliminated 90% of manual fiscal document review, without changing their ERP, their tax compliance software, or their team structure.
reduction in analyst hours on fiscal document review
unstructured fiscal documents processed monthly
full-time equivalent analysts redeployed to higher-value work
The situation
Documents the system couldn't read.
A publicly listed education company receives approximately 1,500 fiscal documents monthly that don't follow standard invoice patterns. Supplier invoices, service orders, reimbursements, intercompany documents. All arriving in formats that fall outside the structured templates their ERP and tax compliance software are built to process.
When a document doesn't match the expected format, the system can't categorize it, can't match it to a valid purchase order, and can't apply the correct Brazilian tax treatment. The document stops moving. It lands in a queue.
The company's solution was a team of four full-time analysts whose entire role was to review, classify and manually process these documents every month. They cross-referenced purchase orders, applied tax categorization rules and pushed each document through the approval workflow by hand. It worked, but it scaled with headcount, not with intelligence.
The compliance pressure: In Brazil's tax environment, unprocessed or incorrectly categorized fiscal documents carry real risk: penalties, audit exposure, and delayed closing cycles. For a publicly listed company with reporting obligations, the stakes are higher than for a private one. Every document has to be resolved correctly and on time.
Results in production validation
Three months in. The numbers hold.
Reduction in analyst hours on fiscal document review
90% assertiveness rate across 3 months of assisted production; 90% of documents processed without human intervention.
Unstructured fiscal documents processed monthly
Documents that the ERP and tax compliance software couldn't categorize, now handled automatically.
Full-time equivalent analysts redeployed
Four full-time roles whose sole purpose was unstructured document review, now redirected to higher-value finance work.
The solution
Teaching the Finance Analyst to read what the ERP couldn't.
Docana deployed a Finance Analyst super employee trained on the company's own fiscal document taxonomy, purchase order structure and Brazilian tax categorization rules. The Finance Analyst reads each incoming document, determines its correct category, matches it to the corresponding purchase order, applies the appropriate tax treatment and routes it for approval, the same process the human analysts performed, now handled automatically for 90% of the monthly volume.
The 10% that fall below the Finance Analyst's confidence threshold are flagged and routed to the remaining human reviewer for final judgment. Every document (automatically processed or human-reviewed) carries a full audit trail tracing the categorization decision back to the source rule.
The Finance Analyst doesn't replace the ERP or the tax compliance software. It sits between the incoming document and the system, reading, categorizing and completing the same forms the analyst team filled manually, within guardrails that ensure only approved fields are touched.
What changed
The queue disappeared. The team didn't.
90% of documents processed without human intervention
The Finance Analyst handles classification, PO (purchase order) matching and tax categorization automatically for 90% of monthly volume. The remaining 10% are flagged for human review with a pre-populated analysis.
Four full-time analysts redeployed
Four roles whose entire purpose was unstructured document review are now available for higher-value finance work: analysis, reporting, business partnering. Work that actually requires human judgment.
Zero changes to the ERP or tax compliance software
The Finance Analyst sits between the incoming documents and the existing systems. It reads, categorizes and fills the same forms the analyst team completed manually. The ERP was not modified. The tax software was not replaced.
Full audit trail for every categorization decision
Every document carries a complete trace showing which rule was applied, which PO was matched and which tax treatment was used. Defensible in any audit context.
Estimated US-market equivalent impact
Estimated annual savings in US-equivalent terms, based on 4 FTE (full-time equivalent) roles at average US finance analyst fully-loaded cost, redirected from document processing to higher-value work.
Fiscal documents processed annually with full audit trail, documents that previously required individual human review for every categorization decision.
US-market impact figures are estimates based on US average finance analyst FTE costs. Actual results vary by organization. Production validation figures reflect 3 months of assisted deployment.
“We did not have to change our ERP, we did not have to replace our tax compliance software, and we did not have to expand the analyst team. The work just stopped piling up.
See it working in your stack.
In a 30-minute demo we wire Docana into a sample of your data and show what your first super employee surfaces on day one.