Today's Agent Skill: Inbox-to-Invoice Reconciler
What It Does
Finance teams lose hours every month matching vendor invoices buried in email against what actually cleared the bank. The mismatch usually isn't fraud — it's a duplicate PDF, a partial payment, or a vendor who changed their invoice numbering mid-quarter. This skill does the tedious three-way match so a human only reviews the exceptions.
How It Works
The agent pulls invoice attachments from a mailbox folder, extracts vendor, invoice number, date, and amount from each one, then joins that set against a payment export from your accounting system. It flags four exception classes — unmatched invoices, unmatched payments, amount variances beyond a tolerance threshold, and suspected duplicates — and leaves everything that reconciles cleanly out of the report entirely.
How to Deploy It
Drop the SKILL.md into your agent's skills directory (`~/.claude/skills/invoice-reconciler/SKILL.md` or the equivalent path for your runtime) and make sure the agent has read access to the invoice folder plus the payment CSV. Trigger it by name or let the description-based router pick it up when someone asks to reconcile invoices.
SKILL.md — Ready to Deploy
# Invoice Reconciler
## Description
Performs a two-way reconciliation between vendor invoices received as email attachments and payments recorded in an accounting export. Produces an exceptions-only report so the reviewer reads ten lines instead of four hundred. Handles partial payments, duplicate submissions, and vendor invoice-number format drift.
## Trigger
Invoke when the user asks to reconcile invoices, match invoices to payments, close the books, find unpaid invoices, check for duplicate invoices, or run month-end AP review. Also triggers when a user shares a payments CSV and an invoice folder in the same request without naming the task.
## Input
- `invoice_source`: path to a folder of invoice PDFs/images, or a mailbox label to fetch from
- `payments_export`: CSV or XLSX with at minimum date, amount, vendor/payee, and reference columns
- `period`: date range to reconcile (defaults to prior calendar month)
- `tolerance`: acceptable amount variance, absolute or percentage (defaults to $0.01)
## Steps
1. Enumerate every invoice in `invoice_source` for the target period. Do not skip files that fail to parse — record them as a separate `unreadable` class.
2. Extract vendor namCopy the full SKILL.md and drop it into your agent's skills directory to activate this skill.