Why Kahwah exists
Accounts payable isn’t the problem. The repetition is.
Kahwah is an accounts payable product. It takes on the reading, sorting and recording that arriving invoices and credit notes create — and leaves the checking and the deciding with the person whose job that is.
The work as it stands
Most of it isn’t difficult. There’s just a lot of it.
An invoice arrives. Someone reads it, types what it says somewhere else, checks the parts worth checking, decides which part of the business it belongs to, and puts it where it can be found again. Then the next one arrives.
In a lot of businesses this sits with someone who is also doing several other jobs — an owner, a practice manager, whoever ended up with it. They aren’t struggling with the work. They’re doing the same handful of small tasks over and over, across tools that were never designed to hold the whole process together.
How we think about automation
Some of this work should be automatic. Some of it never should.
Reading a document, pulling out what it says, putting it in order, keeping track of what has been dealt with — that is work software should be doing, and Kahwah does it.
What follows is a different kind of work. Whether a figure looks right, which category something belongs to, whether it’s ready to be approved: those are calls someone has to make, and they can only be made from information that stays in plain sight. So the document stays available beside what was read from it, anything uncertain is marked rather than smoothed over, and nothing is settled until a person says it is.
What we’re building
We started with the invoice because that’s where the work starts.
Invoices and credit notes are what arrives, and reading them properly is the first useful thing Kahwah can do. It isn’t the point of the product.
The point is everything the document sets off: checking it, deciding what it belongs to, approving it, and keeping the result in a state that’s still worth something a month later. That is accounts payable, and that’s what Kahwah is for — not a better way to scan a page.
The document
- Arrives
- Categorised
- Read
Accounts payable
- Checked
- Approved
- Settled
- Kept
It should feel like the work got smaller — not like there’s another system to keep up with.
Every business already has software asking for its attention. Accounts payable software should mostly stay quiet: show what has arrived, show what needs a look, make what’s been done easy to find again, and otherwise stay out of the way.
If that’s how you’d want it to work,
we’d like to hear from you.
Request access and tell us a little about your business.
Request access