1What AI in an ERP means
Artificial intelligence in an ERP does not mean a system that makes decisions on its own. It means speeding up the two places where an ERP costs the most time: finding something out and typing something in.
Finding out currently means setting the right filter, opening the right list and navigating three screens deep — for a question that could have been asked in one sentence. Typing in means copying an incoming invoice field by field, although the paper in front of you already contains all of it.
Those two points are exactly what the AI in facturado covers. It is not a separate module and not an add-on: it sits inside the application — as an assistant in the sidebar, and as automatic document capture whenever a file is uploaded.
"What did we invoice Daimler this year?" — answered from your documents rather than from a report you had to build first.
Upload an incoming invoice, delivery note or bank statement — the fields come back pre-filled, you check and save.
2The AI assistant
The assistant answers exclusively from your own data — never from the model's memory.
The assistant is reachable from every screen and answers in the language you ask in. To do so it searches your master data and documents in the background — it has no other access and no other source of knowledge.
Examples of questions it answers:
- "Which quotes are still open for Müller GmbH?"
- "How much revenue did we make last quarter?"
- "Do we have article 4711 in stock?"
- "Which invoices contain the 20 mm aluminium plate?"
- "What is on invoice RE-00042?"
What it works with:
Search by company name, customer, debitor or creditor number and VAT id.
Search by article name, article number or drawing number — with unit and available stock.
Quotes, orders, outgoing and incoming invoices — filtered by customer, status and period.
Net and gross totals per currency and status — computed in the database, not estimated from a page of results.
The route through the article: which documents contain it, in what quantity and at what price.
"This year", "last month", "since January" resolve to real date boundaries rather than being guessed.
3Automatic document capture
Drag a file into the assistant or photograph a document with the camera: facturado reads it via text recognition, works out on its own what kind of document it is, and presents you with a pre-filled draft.
PDF, PNG, JPG and TIFF are supported — the scanned sheet as well as the phone photo of a delivery note.
Invoice number, date, service date, supplier and VAT id, net and gross totals, plus every line item with quantity, unit price and VAT rate.
Delivery note number, date, supplier and the delivered line items with article number and delivered quantity — as the basis for a goods receipt.
IBAN, account holder, statement number, opening and closing balance, plus every booking with date, purpose, counterparty and a correctly signed amount. Card statements are recognised separately.
If a PDF already carries an e-invoice inside it, that is parsed rather than estimated — structured data is exact where text recognition always remains an approximation.
4Your data stays in Germany
Every AI model runs on our own servers in Germany — under our control, not at an AI vendor.
Most ERP vendors advertising AI pass your data on to a large AI provider — usually in the US. facturado does not: text recognition and language model run on our own servers in a German data centre, operated by us. Your documents never leave Germany.
What that means in practice:
The hardware sits in a German data centre and belongs to us, not to a cloud AI provider. There is no intermediary between your ERP and the model.
The models only ever read their weights. No request changes them, and nothing from your documents feeds into a later model.
There is no AI provider outside the EU that you would have to add to your data processing agreement and your Art. 30 GDPR record.
Every tenant connects with its own access token. A request is attributable to exactly one tenant and can be revoked on its own.
Neither requests nor page images are written to disk. Logs contain tenant and timings — never file names and never content.
5Why the AI does not invent answers
The legitimate objection to AI in an ERP is this: a fabricated figure looks exactly like a correct one. A wrong answer about revenue is worse than no answer at all — because nobody checks it.
So the assistant is not built to sound confident. It is built to ask when in doubt:
- No figure without a lookup. Amounts, document numbers and customer names may only come out of a query against your data. If a search finds nothing, the assistant says so — instead of guessing.
- Hits carry a confidence. Every customer and article found comes with a match confidence. When the best two hits are too close to tell apart, the assistant asks which one you mean.
- Typos are named as such. If nothing matches what was typed, similar spellings are searched — and the result is explicitly flagged as a correction, not served as an answer to the original question.
- Totals come from the database. Revenue is computed across every matching document, not across the first twenty of a result list.
- Invented filters are caught. If the assistant narrows a search to a status or a year by itself and finds nothing, the search is repeated without that filter and the filter is disclosed.
- Today's date is stated. A language model only knows the state of its training data. "This year" is therefore resolved against the real calendar.
6What the AI deliberately does not do
Just as important as what the AI can do is what it deliberately may not do.
The assistant can search and evaluate your data — it cannot create, change or delete anything. A language model picks its own actions; a writing one would be a single misfire away from running.
Whatever is read out of a document reaches you as a pre-filled form — never as a saved record. Approval stays with a person.
The assistant sees your tenant's data and nothing beyond it. Actions are only offered where your user permissions allow them.
If a document is longer than can be read in one pass, that is stated — rather than passing off half an analysis as a complete one.
7Availability & plans
In facturado, AI is not a surcharge and not an add-on. The assistant and document capture are already part of the Starter plan and grow with the modules you enable.
- AI assistant for customers, suppliers, articles and documents
- Totals and revenue on request
- Document capture for incoming invoices
- Bank statement import
- Everything in Starter
- Read delivery notes and turn them into goods receipts
- Stock and inventory questions for the assistant