The problem

Halden bills clients monthly for every shipment they move, usually 300 to 400 of them. Their two-person finance team pulled shipment data from a Google Sheet the dispatchers kept, matched it to rate cards in another sheet, then typed each invoice into Xero by hand. It took three working days at the start of every month, and roughly one invoice in twenty went out with the wrong rate.

What we built

An n8n workflow that runs on the 1st at 6:00 AM. It reads the dispatch sheet, applies the right rate card for each client and lane, and creates draft invoices in Xero with every shipment as a line item. Anything that doesn’t match a rate card goes to a review list in Slack instead of being guessed.

We also added a check that flags shipments with no proof of delivery attached. That turned out to be the main reason clients disputed invoices.

The result

Invoice prep now takes about 40 minutes, almost all of it spent on the exceptions list. Disputed invoices dropped from around 18 a month to 3. The dispatch team didn’t have to change how they log shipments.