Manual document processing is now the expensive option.
If your team keys documents into a system by hand — invoices, claims, CVs, product sheets, yours or your clients' — much of that work is now the kind of task a model handles well. How much of yours, and at what accuracy, is what Coldstill measures on your own documents before you change anything. Your team keeps the review step: the people who know the documents check the ones the system flags, rather than keying every field of every document.
When this pays for itself
Once keying one document type costs your team more than about $1,000 a month, the arithmetic starts working. At the figures this page uses — 10 minutes a document, $24 an hour — that is roughly 250 documents a month, and the gap widens with every document above it.
It pays hardest on the documents that resist templates: supplier statements, invoices where the line-item detail matters, and the client-specific formats that still end up keyed by hand because nothing off the shelf reads them the way your team does. Those are the ones that stay expensive as volume grows.
The cost comparison
What that looks like on your numbers rather than the example ones.
How switching works
Audit
A $800 assessment built from a sample of documents your team has already processed. The verdict covers achievable accuracy, what stays manual, and the running cost. 2–3 days.
Build
A model of your own, trained on your historical records where they are consistent enough. Where they aren't, the work runs through a pay-per-use AI service for a short interim period to build a clean set of processed examples, then moves to your own model. The audit sets out which route applies.
Run
The model handles the data entry, and your team reviews the documents it flags. Coldstill hosts and operates everything — there is nothing to install and no AI team to hire. Monthly, cancellable, and the trained model is yours if you ever want to take it in-house.
Scope, terms and what's included
If you process documents for clients
Bookkeeping and accounting practices, outsourcers and staffing agencies key documents for many clients at once, and the engagement is built for that shape: one model for the document type your team keys most, trained across your whole client base, not a separate project per client. What qualifies is the combined volume, and the same goes for the thresholds above — the figure that counts is the cost across all clients, not any one of them. The hours that currently go on keying can go back to client work that bills, and a new client's documents no longer mean hiring ahead of the revenue — the same people review exceptions instead of typing. The engagement, the data terms and the fee sit with your firm, and your clients' records are covered by the same commitments as any other engagement data: used only to build and evaluate your model, never Coldstill's and never another client's (how your data is handled). The free read covers your highest-volume document type across clients, from combined volume figures, within a working day.
Error rates
Both models and manual keying produce errors. The difference is that the model's error rate is measured field by field against your own historical records before anything goes live, and the tool that does that checking is part of what you receive, so the numbers can be re-checked on your side at any time. Your documents are used only to build and evaluate your own model. How accuracy is measured · how your data is handled.
Get a free read on your task
Send what the documents are, roughly how many arrive each month, and how long one takes. The read comes back with feasibility and cost.
The enquiry form takes six questions and a written read comes back within a working day. Email works just as well: [email protected].