How the Majorelle restaurant saved 100 hours a year by automating invoice management

The Majorelle restaurant, faced with chaotic management of its supplier invoices that monopolized 2 hours a week of its manager's time, called upon our services to automate this process. Thanks to a tailor-made solution combining Notion, n8n, and Outlook, the establishment reduced this time to just 5 minutes per week, resulting in an annual saving of 100 hours.

Context & Challenges

The Majorelle restaurant was facing a major organizational challenge in managing its supplier invoices. The person in charge of the restaurant had to constantly navigate between various operational tasks while managing a constant flow of invoices received by email. This manual management represented 2 hours of administrative work each week. The lack of structured organization in document processing led to considerable time losses: searching for invoices in the email inbox, manually sorting documents, entering information, and approximate archiving. This situation created constant operational stress and diverted the manager from their higher value-added missions for the establishment.

Method

After a complete audit of the Majorelle restaurant's existing processes, we developed a structured approach in several phases. First, we analyzed the flow of incoming emails and identified patterns of supplier invoice receipt. This analysis allowed us to design an optimal data architecture in Notion with two main bases: a suppliers database and an interconnected invoices database. We then designed an intuitive user interface organized into several pages, including a central dashboard highlighting invoices requiring verification. The approach favored ease of use while maintaining complete traceability of operations.

Deployed Systems

The deployed technical architecture is based on n8n automation that orchestrates the entire process.

The system automatically monitors the restaurant's Outlook inbox and triggers a series of actions as soon as an email containing an attachment is detected.

The workflow automates the sorting of emails, the identification of invoices using advanced filtering rules, and then the extraction of data via OCR to retrieve essential information (amount, date, invoice number).

If the supplier does not exist in the Notion database, it is automatically created with the extracted information. The invoice is then recorded in the Notion database with all the appropriate links to the corresponding supplier. Simultaneously, the PDF document is downloaded and archived in the Drive folder structure organized by month.

An auxiliary automation automatically generates the folder structure for each new year. Once the invoice is validated via the Notion dashboard, a second automation sends it directly to the accountant and removes it from the dashboard view.