Supplier price consolidation

646 references, 25 invoice formats, a single table.

Sector : Hospitality — A Brussels restaurant

The context

A restaurant buys from around thirty suppliers. Each one sends invoices in its own PDF format, and prices move between deliveries. Knowing what you actually pay today for a given item means reopening the invoices one by one.

The problem

Nobody does it, because it is two days of data entry. The result: you cannot see when a price went up, and you cannot compare two suppliers on the same item.

What was built

A script walks through every PDF invoice, extracts the product lines and consolidates them into a single workbook, one tab per supplier. For each reference, the most recent invoice wins — so the table is a current price list, not an archive.

What it changes

646 references consolidated across 25 suppliers, where manual entry would have taken two days. The workbook regenerates as new invoices arrive.

How it works

Python, pdfplumber for extraction, openpyxl for output. Twenty-five distinct parsers, one per invoice format — two formats coexist at a single supplier. Deduplication by product code, VAT read from the invoices with reverse charge for exporting suppliers, and categories derived from the code prefix.

What this could look like for you

This is the most transferable case of all: any business buying from several suppliers has the same blind spot. The limitation is honest and worth knowing — a scanned invoice with no extractable text does not go through this path. That is precisely where reading by vision model takes over.