Appraisal and Asset Valuation

Vehicle Appraisal Office

Vehicle Appraisal

A repair invoice with 20-30 parts — read on its own from email and entered on its own into the appraisal management system, even when the system has no API at all.

Dedicated appraisal management system — local + cloud

RPA (automation that simulates a human employee)

OCR / data extraction from invoices (PDF + scans)

n8n

Dedicated cloud server

Challenge

The Challenge

A small vehicle appraisal office (3-5 employees) working with a dedicated, closed appraisal management system, in two versions running in parallel: one local on the computer and one in the cloud of the head office branch. Every repair invoice arrives by email, gets downloaded to a folder, and then each item is keyed in manually — part name, price, type (original/aftermarket/used), part number and labor charges too. In the client's words: "Sometimes it's 20-30 parts, where you have to enter each part by hand." This was the step defined as "the most fundamental thing" — it consumes the most time, is exposed to errors, and delays work on the cases.

Solution

The Solution

We built the solution in two stages. Stage 1 — ingestion and extraction: the moment an invoice lands in a dedicated folder, the system reads the file (PDF or scan) and automatically extracts the vehicle number, the list of parts, the prices, the part type and the part numbers into structured data. Stage 2 — automatic entry: this is where the critical point surfaced — on inspection it turned out the appraisal management system has no API. Instead of getting stuck, we moved to RPA: an automation that acts like a human employee, records the clicks itself and then repeats them on its own. The RPA opens the appraisal management system, locates the case by vehicle number, and enters all the parts, part numbers, prices and labor into the correct tabs — with smart routing between the two systems: private reports go into the local system, insurance-company reports go into the cloud system. A retry mechanism and exception handling were added in case the interface doesn't respond, along with alerts to the team at the start and end of processing, so there's no need to manually check what happened with each case.

Our Approach

Automatic extraction of repair-invoice line items (20-30 lines per invoice) from PDF files and scans that land in a dedicated folder

Automatic entry of the parts, part numbers, prices and labor into the appraisal management system via RPA — since the system has no API

Smart routing between the two versions of the appraisal management system: private reports to the local system, insurance-company reports to the head office cloud

Retry mechanism and exception handling when the interface doesn't respond, plus end-to-end testing on real invoices

Alerts to the team at the start and end of processing a case / when human handling is required

Automation infrastructure and a dedicated server (n8n) that run the process in the background with no manual runs

Technologies Used

Dedicated appraisal management system — local + cloudRPA (automation that simulates a human employee)OCR / data extraction from invoices (PDF + scans)Emailn8nDedicated cloud server

The service behind this project

Business Automation

Results

The Results

Parts per invoice captured automatically instead of typed by hand20-30

Target systems populated automatically (local + cloud)2

We replaced a manual data-entry process for invoices with 20-30 parts — part name, price, type and part number on each line — with automatic ingestion from email straight into the appraisal management system. We managed to do this even after it turned out the system has no API, by moving to RPA. Both stages of the solution were closed as a deal (accepted), and the client has already paid a deposit on the RPA stage. The staged build let the client start from the basics and continue to the automatic-entry stage separately.

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