Marketing & creative agency
Chicago, IL
Ad platforms bill in round threshold charges with no invoice number, and freelancer invoices rarely share a template.
The setup
The company and its vendors are made up. It still has its own QuickBooks company, its own local sales tax, and documents written the way this trade writes them.
Its own QuickBooks company
Nobody approved or corrected anything along the way. A document held for review stayed held, so every result is exactly what was read.
Vendors in 8 trades.
From
Ad platforms
To: Wendlemarsh Creative Studio
From
SaaS subscriptions
To: Wendlemarsh Creative Studio
From
Cloud infrastructure
To: Wendlemarsh Creative Studio
From
Freelancers & contractors
To: Wendlemarsh Creative Studio
From
Photo & video production
To: Wendlemarsh Creative Studio
From
Print & fabrication
To: Wendlemarsh Creative Studio
From
Coworking
To: Wendlemarsh Creative Studio
From
Stock media
To: Wendlemarsh Creative Studio
The pile
Invoices
Receipts
Credit memos
Vendor statements
107 documents in 106 PDF files. The 5 vendor statements list invoices that were also sent, so the right number of new bills from them is zero.
39% arrived as paper
42 of 107 were scanned, photographed, faxed or photocopied. 65 were clean files.
The traps
Ad platforms charge the card whenever spend crosses a threshold, so the amounts land on exact round values, there is no invoice number, and several charges from the same vendor on the same day is normal. Freelancer invoices are the opposite, and they rarely share a template.
Not in dollars
A freelancer bills in euros. The amount reads correctly and the money is still wrong without the currency.
Billed and due the same day
A subscription settles the day it is issued. It is not overdue and should not be chased.
The line total is not quantity times price
A volume tier the page never shows. The vendor billed 399.00, and recalculating restates the invoice.
Excerpts drawn in the shape of this industry's documents, with invented names. The full test kit carries 18 kinds of difficulty across all five businesses. See every one
The results
Measured in two places, across every document in the test. Inside DocStreamAI: what kind of document each one is, what was read off it, and whether it made it from the email, each checked against the answer key written for every document. Then in QuickBooks: whether the record that landed matches. Receipts also have their own section.
107 documents sent to Wendlemarsh Creative Studio, in 106 PDF files, each scored against its answer key. Scored October 2, 2026. Receipts are in these figures too, and have their own section below.
Document type
Invoice, receipt or credit memo identified correctly, and vendor statements kept out of the books.
Of the 3 not classified correctly, 1 was waiting to match a card payment, 1 was posted, and the QuickBooks record matched, and 1 was posted when it should have been held for review
Every key field right*
Documents with every key field correct at once.
Of the 4 with a key field wrong, 2 were posted, and the QuickBooks record matched, 1 was held for review, and 1 was posted with a wrong value
Fields read correctly
Values read correctly off the page, every field pooled.
Reached processing
Documents that reached DocStreamAI from the email and were handled: a record for each bill, receipt and credit, and none for a vendor statement.
Vendor statements
Statements where nothing was created, the correct result.
* Line descriptions, quantities and unit prices count as lower severity and are left out of this figure. QuickBooks records each line by its amount, so a wrong quantity or unit price does not change what lands in the books.
Receipts
40 receipts, from the inbox to the books
Measured on their own. Each one was checked against its answer key, and every one that posted was read back from this company's QuickBooks.
Reading the receipt
Reached DocStreamAI and read
Read as a receipt
Every key field right
Every field right, line items included
Traps
5 of 5 caught
1 of 1
Not in dollars
1 read in their own currency and kept out of these US dollar books.
1 of 1
A bigger, unrelated number
The stray figure was never taken for the total.
1 of 1
Vendor spelled another way
Booked to the same vendor however the name was written.
2 of 2
Total is not the amount owed
2 paid in full and posted for the full total.
In QuickBooks
38 posted as expenses, and every one read back from QuickBooks.
Amount
38 of 38
Tax
38 of 38
Vendor
38 of 38
Date
37 of 38
Currency
38 of 38
Kept out of the books
2 of 40 never posted, so nothing wrong reached QuickBooks.
Where every receipt ended up
Every receipt is counted once, in one of these. Passed means right from the email to the QuickBooks record.
Where it went wrong
In QuickBooks
What landed in the books
The record in QuickBooks matches the document, field by field, per record type.
Every record posted
77 of 80 records posted to QuickBooks match the document on every field, every record type.
The 3 that do not match are shown below, with why.
Documents with no trap
93.9% of bills and vendor credits posted to QuickBooks with every field matching the document.
Bills and vendor credits, traps included: 40 of 42 (95.2%).
Created from invoices.
93.9% match the document, traps included. From documents with no trap: 22 of 24. 2 invoices went in as expenses where a bill was due, and count here as bills that do not match.
Created from credit memos.
100.0% match the document, traps included. From documents with no trap: 9 of 9.
Created from receipts.
97.4% match the receipt on every field read back, lines included. On amount, tax, vendor, date and currency: 37 of 38. All 38 posted receipts were read back.
Creative agency · Receipt
Went into QuickBooks wrong
Sent to Wendlemarsh Creative Studio
Read right, then posted with the wrong date by a bug in our bulk submit button. The date in QuickBooks does not match the receipt.
Creative agency · Invoice
Went into QuickBooks wrong
Sent to Wendlemarsh Creative Studio
Read as a receipt, so it posted as an expense where a bill was due. Its printed due date also disagrees with its payment terms, which should have held it for review.
Creative agency · Invoice
Went into QuickBooks wrong
Sent to Wendlemarsh Creative Studio
Its due date was not read, and it should have been held for review. It went into QuickBooks as an expense where a bill was due, with no QuickBooks record linked back to it.
Vendor
The vendor on the QuickBooks record matches the vendor on the document.
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