11/07/2026
Been heads-down building something for my business that I probably should have built a year ago.
We import from about 9 suppliers across Europe, South America and West Africa. Every invoice arrives in a different format, some in French, some in Lithuanian, some in English, different VAT rules, different pack sizes. Figuring out what each product actually costs us after freight, VAT, and currency has always been a manual headache.
So I built a system that reads a supplier invoice (any format, any language), extracts every line item, calculates the true landed cost per unit, and matches it directly to our Shopify catalogue. If it sees a product it hasn’t matched before, it flags it and I link it once, then it remembers forever. Next invoice from the same supplier? Fully automatic.
It also generates purchase orders, tracks pricing history across invoices, and handles all the Lithuanian VAT compliance we need for filing.
About 80% done now. The core extraction and matching works. Still polishing a few edge cases around how different suppliers describe the same product differently, but honestly it’s already saving us hours every week.
Funny thing is, every small importer or wholesaler I talk to has the exact same problem. Spreadsheets, manual lookups, guessing margins. Nobody has a clean answer for it.
Anyway. Back to building.
