Consolidating participant billing from course lists and subsidies

Starting point

A non-profit educational institution with around 450 employees offers about 3,600 courses a year. Its administration produces around 7,200 participant invoices a month, covering course fees, reductions and public subsidies. Data on attendance, discounts and funding rates comes from the course management system, spreadsheets and emails. For each invoice, a clerk spends an average of five minutes checking course lists, attendance and funding conditions before entering amounts in the finance system. Eight employees thus spend almost half their working time on recurring checks and manual corrections.

The challenge

Participant billing is central for the institution, as it has to bring course fees, discounts and subsidies together correctly. In practice, however, course lists, attendance records and funding commitments come in different formats. The administration transfers amounts manually into the finance system, checks free-text notes on special cases and compares them with policies. Questions to course instructors and controlling are frequent, because justifications for reductions are missing or unclear. As a result, deadlines for consolidated invoices to funders regularly get tight, which makes liquidity planning harder.

Why this remained unsolved

The administration had seen the problem for years but prioritized it behind course planning and funding applications. Previous digitalization projects focused on introducing the course management software and moving to a new finance system. The billing steps in between were considered too fragmented and too dependent on free-text notes to automate with classic rules. A full ERP project would have been too expensive for the organization, while the manual work, though burdensome, still seemed just about manageable.

The institution introduced an agentic workflow that pulls participant billing together from the course management system, spreadsheets and emails and prepares it for the administration. The workflow reads course lists and attendance, assigns them to the correct fees, discounts and subsidies and generates a structured billing proposal per participant. Generative AI summarizes free-text justifications for reductions, checks them against stored policies and flags unclear cases. Clerks receive a sorted task list of checked proposals, can adjust amounts and then pass the invoices to the finance system in one batch.

Where generative AI comes in

Generative AI interprets free-text notes from course lists and emails, assigns them to the matching billing items and drafts justified proposals for discounts and subsidies. It compares content with stored policies, flags deviations and summarizes special cases clearly, which significantly shortens manual review.