Sample Scope: What You Get Within 24 Hours
This is a representative example of the document you receive within 24 hours of a scoping request. Names and numbers are illustrative; the structure, the level of detail, and the hour estimate per phase are exactly what you get.
1. Context
A 60-person wholesale company reconciles ~450 supplier invoices per month against purchase orders. Two people in accounting spend a combined 38 hours per month matching line items, chasing discrepancies by email, and entering corrections into the ERP.
2. Current process
- Invoices arrive as PDF attachments in a shared mailbox.
- An accountant opens each PDF, finds the matching PO in the ERP, and compares line items by hand.
- Mismatches (~12% of invoices) trigger a manual email to the supplier, tracked in a spreadsheet.
- Matched invoices are entered into the ERP for payment approval.
Cost of the status quo: 38 h/month × loaded cost ≈ €2,100/month, plus late-payment fees from slipped discrepancy cases.
3. Proposed solution
Deterministic logic handles the predictable parts. AI is used only where rules fail.
- Intake: mailbox watcher pulls invoice PDFs, extracts structured line items (document AI, EU-hosted).
- Matching engine: rule-based three-way match against PO and goods receipt. No AI involved — this must be auditable.
- Discrepancy handling: AI drafts the supplier clarification email from the diff; a human approves before anything is sent.
- ERP entry: matched invoices posted via the ERP’s API with a full audit log.
What stays manual: payment approval, supplier escalations, anything the matcher flags below a confidence threshold.
4. Phases and hours
| Phase | Deliverable | Duration | Estimated hours |
|---|---|---|---|
| Phase 1: Proof of concept | Extraction + matching on 3 months of your historical invoices, accuracy report | 2 weeks | 40 h |
| Phase 2: Production pipeline | Mailbox intake, ERP posting, approval UI, error handling | 3 weeks | 80 h |
| Phase 3: Hardening + handover | Monitoring, alerting, runbook, team walkthrough | 1 week | 24 h |
Total: 144 estimated hours · roughly 6 weeks. Billed for the hours worked, at the hourly rate agreed up front, phase by phase. Each phase is accepted on its own. You can stop after phase 1 and keep the accuracy report.
5. What I need from you
- Read access to 3 months of historical invoices and POs (anonymized is fine for phase 1).
- One accounting contact for a weekly 30-minute check-in.
- ERP API credentials for a test environment (from phase 2).
6. Assumptions and exclusions
- ERP exposes a usable API (verified in the scoping call; if not, the phase 2 estimate is revised before it starts).
- Supplier email sending stays human-approved — fully automatic sending is out of scope by design.
- Hosting on your infrastructure or EU cloud; no data leaves the EU.
7. Decision
This document is written so you can forward it to whoever signs off. The reply you owe me is one of three words: yes, no, or “call” — and any of the three is fine.
The “call” is right here, no form required:
Planning beyond a pilot? This is what an engagement through to production looks like: production sample scope, 700 hours in five phases.
Your scope follows the same structure: phases with hour estimates you can forward to whoever signs off, within 24 hours.
Hour estimates per phase, or a clear no with reasons.
Your agents answer from whatever the retriever finds, and too often that is last quarter's truth. I build the context layer they answer and act from: a temporal knowledge graph that keeps every fact with its source and the time it held, reads with each person's own permissions, and writes nothing without a person's approval. On your own tenant, billed by the hour, step by step.