A phone call that shouldn't have been necessary
In early 2025, someone close to me noticed her telecom bill was wrong. Not dramatically wrong — just enough to be annoying. She called the operator. They said it was a 'technical error' and fixed it. Then it happened again the next month. And the month after that.
When I mentioned this to a group of friends running their own businesses, the reaction was immediate. Everyone had a version of the same story. But the real problem wasn't just finding the errors. It was the exhausting process of getting the money back.
Often, disputing an invoice takes longer than the payment terms allow. You end up having to pay the wrong amount just to avoid late fees or service interruptions, and then you have to fight for a refund or credit note later. Finding the issue is step one, but recovery is where companies actually lose their money and time.
I built a small tool to track and flag these discrepancies for my friends. It worked for detection, but it quickly became obvious that the true value lay in streamlining the dispute process itself. If we all have this problem, doesn't every company?
With over ten years of experience in data science and data analysis at large, data-driven companies, I knew this was a solvable problem. Not with more accountants or more spreadsheets, but with software that reads invoices, spots the drift, and semi-automates the recovery process.
In a tightening economy, absorbing the cost of wrong invoices is a luxury no one can afford. That's how SopiSafe became a real product — not just to find billing drift, but to actually recover overpaid amounts for Finnish businesses.
Why invoice drift is everyone's problem
These aren't our numbers — they're from published industry research.
Nearly 8 in 10 finance teams report that managing supplier disputes consumes more time and resources than any other part of the accounts payable process.
Institute of Financial Operations & LeadershipDuplicate invoices, missed discounts, and pricing errors result in 1% to 2% of all annual disbursements being paid out erroneously.
Industry average recovery audit dataResolving a single PO or pricing mismatch adds 7 to 10 days to the processing cycle, frequently pushing invoices past their due dates.
Resolve Pay ResearchFrom frustration to product
A wrong telecom invoice. Then another. Then a pattern. A small tracking tool is built for a group of friends running businesses — just to see how often it actually happens.
Finding errors isn't enough. Disputes take longer than payment terms, forcing companies to pay wrong invoices just to avoid late fees. The real problem is getting the money back.
If friends face it, every company faces it. With the economy tightening, paying extra on wrong invoices is a luxury nobody can afford. The decision is made: build a product that doesn't just find leakage, but recovers it.
SopiSafe launches. A proper platform for semi-automated recovery — built by someone who spent a decade turning messy data into actionable financial outcomes.