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The challenge
A mid-sized solar company in Munich serves many customers across Germany. Every month DATEV produces a PDF report of all open items – 50 to 60 lines that finance checked one by one and forwarded via WhatsApp. It took 30–45 minutes, was error-prone and delayed follow-up on outstanding payments.
- Manual checks: every line reviewed by hand for status, due date and amount; small amounts were often missed
- No standard format: WhatsApp messages written by hand, with no traceability or audit trail
- Late notifications: overdue payments escalated too late, hurting cash flow
The solution
- The email with the DATEV PDF is detected automatically
- PDF.co extracts every invoice line into structured data
- Zapier Looping processes each line and checks its status
- Superchat sends standardised WhatsApp messages to the right teams
The results
- Process time down from 30–45 minutes to under 2 minutes
- Zero missed items – every line in the DATEV report is processed
- DSO reduced by 20% through faster follow-up
- Audit-ready communication in one consistent format
- More capacity in finance for higher-value work
Conclusion
With Zapier, PDF.co and Superchat, the monthly open-items process now runs fully automatically. If your team still checks DATEV reports by hand, we can build the same for you.
Free 15-minute automation check
Running similar manual processes? In 15 minutes we show you which steps can be automated right away, how much time you get back each month, and which tools fit your setup.