Bulk invoice scanning, with a human in the loop.
Drop a stack of supplier invoices into a multi-page feeder scanner. ShelfGuard reads every page and prepares matched goods-in lines for your team to review and approve — cutting hours of manual entry without ever updating stock behind your back.
ShelfGuard pays for itself on data entry alone.
The average independent supermarket processes 30–60 supplier invoices a week. Typing them into a stock system — line by line, SKU by SKU — is the single biggest back-office cost most owners don't measure.
6 hrs/week of typing
40 invoices × ~9 mins each, sat at the office PC. That's £90–£140 of staff time every week, just keying numbers a scanner can read.
2–3% data-entry errors
Wrong cost prices, wrong pack sizes, missed lines. Margin leaks you only spot months later when the stock count refuses to balance.
~90 seconds per invoice
Stack the pages, hit scan, walk away. A whole week of invoices in under an hour — including the human glance to approve.
~£500/month back
Reclaimed staff hours go to the shop floor — restocking, customers, fresh prep — not the office. ShelfGuard pays for itself two times over.
Stack. Scan. Done.
We supply (or recommend) a desktop multi-page sheet-feed scanner. Any decent feeder model works — the scanner is the cheap bit. The intelligence lives in ShelfGuard.
OCR prepares the lines. A real person completes the delivery.
ShelfGuard never updates stock from a scan alone. Every scanned invoice lands as a draft goods-in — your team checks the lines against what physically arrived and only then completes the delivery. Stock moves when a human says it moved, not when a camera says so. Protection against bad OCR, fraud and supplier errors is built into the workflow.
Draft until approved
OCR output is a proposal, not a fact. Stock levels, cost prices and supplier ledgers stay untouched until a named user completes the delivery.
Human-controlled verification
Every line shows the OCR reading next to the original page. Anything ambiguous is flagged — quantities, costs and pack sizes need a person to confirm.
Discrepancy detection
Short cases, price changes and unlisted SKUs are caught before they hit stock. Suppliers can't quietly slip something through.
Full audit trail
Who scanned it, who reviewed it, who approved it — timestamped on the delivery. If anything is ever queried, the paper trail is already there.
Scan → OCR → review → match → complete → stock updates.
Six clear steps. The first two are software doing the heavy lifting. The next three are a human signing off. Stock only ever moves at step six.
Every line, checked and matched.
You don't trust software blindly. Neither do we. Every scanned invoice lands in a review queue with the original page next to the extracted lines — green for matched, amber for "have a look", red for new SKUs.
Bookers · invoice INV-884217 3 pages · scanned 09:12 · 24 lines · £1,482.60
Six reasons owners add this on day one.
Pays the ShelfGuard bill — twice
If your team spends 6 hours a week on invoice entry at £12/hr, that's £312/month. The scanner add-on costs less and removes the work.
Faster than a person, every time
A 3-page invoice with 40 lines: ~12 mins by hand, ~25 seconds scanned. Same result, no typos, no missed lines.
More accurate than a person
OCR doesn't get tired at 4pm. Cost prices, pack sizes and quantities land verbatim from the supplier's PDF — every time.
Frees staff for the shop floor
The hours stuck in the office go back to the till, the chiller, the customer asking where the rice is. Your shop runs better.
Catches supplier price creep
ShelfGuard flags any cost that's gone up since last invoice — even by 2p. You decide whether to pass it on, before it eats your margin.
HMRC-ready archive
Every original page stored, searchable by supplier, date or invoice number. No more shoeboxes. No more "where's that delivery note?"
Any feeder scanner works. We'll supply one.
ShelfGuard is hardware-agnostic. If you've already got a multi-page sheet-feed scanner sat in the office, we'll plug straight into it. If not, we'll send a recommended unit with your onboarding kit — small desktop footprint, USB to your back-office PC, ~35 pages a minute.
Multi-page feeder
Has to take a stack — single-sheet flatbeds won't cut it. Any A4 ADF (auto document feeder) scanner from a reputable brand is fine.
Duplex (both sides)
Most supplier invoices have something on the back — terms, second page of lines. Duplex scanners catch both in one pass.
~30+ pages per minute
Anything in this range eats a week's invoices in under an hour. Faster is nice but rarely needed for a single-store back office.
We'll set it up
Onboarding includes plugging the scanner in, calibrating the first batch of supplier templates, and training one staff member. Done in a morning.
Included from day one
Send us last week's stack. We'll scan it back to you.
Post or email a real week of supplier invoices. We'll run them through ShelfGuard and send back the matched goods-in within 24 hours — so you can see the accuracy on your own data, before you commit.