Procurement data · Categorisation · Dashboards
From messy spreadsheets to clean, auditable spend data

Automated categorisation that behaves like a careful analyst – just much faster.

FoxBurrowAI takes raw invoice and purchase-order exports and turns them into rich, sensible spend categories, ready for analysis and dashboards. The workflow was tested on real public sector data and achieved high-quality results that stand up next to a human analyst’s work.

See the example dashboards Share a sample Excel file for a demo
≈99%+ of lines land in sensible categories from average raw data Over 20× cheaper per line than a typical London analyst Optional fully offline workflow for sensitive data
What the prototype has already shown

The underlying research ran FoxBurrowAI’s workflow against a large public invoice dataset and compared it to a careful human baseline.

High quality
Almost every row ends up in a sensible category. Remaining issues mostly come from poor or missing source descriptions rather than the process itself.
• Out-performed a non-specialist St Andrews MSc student doing thoughtful manual categorisation on the same data.
• Designed to behave like a diligent analyst, not a blind code-matcher.
From ~£0.075
Approx. £0.075 per line (≈$0.10) for full categorisation, versus ~£1.67 per line for a typical London analyst.
At scale
The economics only get better as files grow larger.
Results in plain language

Quality on par with careful human work, without months of effort.

The FoxBurrowAI workflow was stress-tested on a real government invoice dataset with existing manual categories. The aim was simple: “Would a procurement team feel comfortable using this as a baseline classification?”

  • Almost every line landed in a sensible category, even when the original coding was inconsistent or approximate.
  • Most remaining discrepancies were driven by incomplete, ambiguous, or generic descriptions – in other words, the input data itself rather than the categorisation logic.
  • Compared with a diligent but non-specialist analyst (a St Andrews MSc student), the automated process was at least as strong overall, and more consistent when scaled to large files.
  • Explanations can be attached to each categorisation, so reviewers can see how the decision was reached instead of trusting a “mystery model”.
Cost & speed

Economics that unlock new levels of detail

A generous London rate for a human analyst might be around £500 per day to categorise roughly 300 lines, or about £1.67 per line.

FoxBurrowAI offers categorisation from roughly £0.075 per line (≈$0.10), giving you more than 20× better cost-per-line while still aiming for human-quality results.

Even after allowing for occasional review, prompt upkeep, and infrastructure, it becomes realistic to deeply categorise hundreds of thousands of rows that would never have been inspected line-by-line by a human.

Scale up without growing headcount Ideal for multi-year, multi-entity data
Why this matters in practice

The peas that were coded as “green beans”

In one public dataset, a line labelled by the original team as “green beans” turned out – on closer inspection of the description – to be garden peas.

This wasn’t malicious; it was simply a human under time pressure using any code within the right L2 group (“Fresh vegetables”) to get the job done. Across thousands of rows, these shortcuts add up, especially at deeper category levels.

FoxBurrowAI focuses on the actual text on the line – “peas”, not just “fresh veg” – and works systematically. That means you can finally see where spend is really going:

  • Which specific vegetables are being bought
  • Which items are creeping up in price over time
  • Where suppliers might be over-charging on a narrow slice of spend

The point isn’t to embarrass anyone. It’s to show how easily even conscientious humans slip into approximate coding – and how automated categorisation can quietly keep everything aligned.

Choices & explanations

Ranked options instead of a single guess

Many descriptions have more than one reasonable home. In those cases, FoxBurrowAI can provide a ranked set of category options per line rather than a single forced decision.

The workflow can propose several plausible paths through the hierarchy and attach a brief justification for each. Review teams then see:

  • The primary category FoxBurrowAI recommends
  • Alternative categories that would also make sense
  • Short, human-readable explanations for each choice

This keeps control firmly with you while removing the heavy lifting of thinking up categories from scratch.

Security & deployment

Online or entirely offline – your choice

Some organisations are happy for data to leave their network; others aren’t. FoxBurrowAI can support both:

  • A hosted workflow for standard projects, managed by FoxBurrowAI.
  • A fully offline deployment where the entire process runs on your own infrastructure using in-house models. Data never needs to leave your environment.

Either way, the goal is the same: reliable categorisation that your teams can trust, with appropriate guardrails and auditability.

Working with your data

Built to cope with the reality of Excel exports.

Real procurement data rarely comes as a neat, standardised table. You get multi-sheet workbooks, varying column names, different date formats, free-text descriptions, and the occasional “mystery” column that still turns out to matter.

  • FoxBurrowAI’s pipeline can automatically detect key fields (supplier, description, amount, date) across a wide range of Excel layouts.
  • You don’t need to pre-map everything to a fixed template first – the workflow is designed to do much of that unglamorous work for you.
  • For particularly complex files, a light touch of one-off setup makes subsequent refreshes straightforward.

Want to see how your own data behaves? Share a sample file and we’ll run it through the process, returning a categorised extract and an example dashboard.

Dashboards

Custom dashboards with no logins or subscriptions

The dashboards on this site are built with Plotly Dash and designed from the ground up for procurement use. They support:

  • Time trends by month and year
  • Hierarchical category drill-down (L1–L4)
  • Key supplier views and summary metrics
  • One-click export of whatever you’re currently viewing

As part of a paid plan, FoxBurrowAI can provide self-contained, offline dashboards tailored to your data. They open in a web browser, require no user accounts, and don’t depend on shared cloud servers.

That makes them ideal for sharing with non-technical stakeholders or in environments where traditional BI tools and user management are a constant friction.

Explore the example dashboards →
Next step

Have a spreadsheet that needs taming?

Whether it’s a year of invoices or a multi-year, multi-entity dataset, FoxBurrowAI can turn it into clean, sensible categories and ready-to-use dashboards. Pricing typically starts from around £0.075 per line for categorisation, with options for one-off projects or ongoing refreshes.

Start a conversation
View example dashboards