Step 1: List the documents that arrive every week
Spend ten minutes writing down what lands in your inbox or shared drive: invoices, purchase orders, contracts, change orders, delivery receipts, certificates, forms. Next to each, write what someone does with it today. That second column is your automation plan.
Step 2: Decide what “done” looks like for each one
For an invoice, done might mean: filed under the vendor, amount and due date recorded, sent to the approver, and a reminder set three days before the due date. Be specific. Vague goals like “organize invoices” produce vague automations.
Step 3: Let AI extract the fields
Modern AI reads PDFs, Word files, spreadsheets and even phone photos of paper. It identifies the document type and pulls out fields such as:
- Invoices: vendor, invoice number, amount, tax, due date
- Contracts: parties, start and end dates, renewal terms, payment terms, obligations
- Change orders: number, amount, schedule impact, response deadline
- Certificates of insurance: insured party, coverage types, expiry date
Scanned documents need OCR (optical character recognition) first. Good platforms do this automatically, so a photo from a job site is as searchable as a typed PDF.
Step 4: Write the routing rules in plain language
The best automations read like instructions you’d give a new hire:
- “Contracts go to Legal for review, then into the client’s folder.”
- “Change orders over $10,000 need the project manager’s approval.”
- “When a certificate of insurance expires in 30 days, remind the subcontractor.”
Step 5: Keep a person on the important decisions
Automation should remove busywork, not judgment. Keep approvals for payments, signatures and anything that goes to a client. A good system records who approved what and when, which also helps at audit time.
Step 6: Measure and expand
After two weeks, check three numbers: how many documents went through without anyone touching them, how many needed a correction, and how much time the team got back. Fix the rules where corrections happen, then add the next document type.
Common mistakes
- Automating everything at once. Start with one or two document types.
- Folders nobody agreed on. Settle your folder structure before automating filing, or the AI will faithfully file into chaos.
- No history. If you can’t see what the automation did, you won’t trust it.