Solution

Weeks to minutes.

Shoken assembles backup documents into invoices and validates them against contract budgets and agency rules. Shoken handles the administrative work in minutes — so agencies can review claims faster and nonprofits can get paid sooner.

Scope of impact

Thousands of contracts.
Billions of dollars. Every one a manual review.

$100B+
Annual state & local human services contracting
Estimated nationwide spend with nonprofit providers.
$16B
In one major U.S. city alone
Across more than 5,000 contracts serving over three million residents.
7,000+
Pending invoices in one comptroller's office
Worth more than $1 billion. In another city, a single agency owes $69M, 40% of it more than two months old.
These contracts pay for our nation's most critical services — care for older adults, children in foster care, families experiencing homelessness, and people with disabilities. When invoices sit, services slow. Some discontinue entirely. Every one of these contracts requires the invoice review process Shoken transforms.
The problem

Manual, linear, and layered with oversight.

Human services invoice review and approval averages a 20-day Level 1 review and can involve five rounds of revision.
01
Provider prepares invoice package offline
The nonprofit assembles a claim package with budget category details, expenditure templates, backup receipts, and ledgers. Invoice templates often require line-by-line manual data entry.
02
Provider submits invoice and emails agency
The package is uploaded to an agency system or an email inbox. The nonprofit often has to separately email their agency point of contact for awareness and next steps.
03
Level 1 line-by-line agency review
Agency staff manually compare every line of the package against the contract and agency rules. Errors are flagged and emailed to the provider one at a time, not collectively — each fix triggers another round-trip. The first review can take more than 20 days.
04
Levels 2–3 for final approval
The Level 1-approved invoice passes through two additional reviewers, often through manual handoffs.
05
Payment
Once approved, payment can take an additional week.
The bottleneck is Step 3. The 20-day review cycle isn't caused by the complexity of the work — it's caused by incomplete or incorrectly formatted submissions that require multiple serial rounds of correction.
Shoken is the solution

Shift quality control upstream.
Catch problems in minutes — not weeks.

Instead of discovering problems during agency review — triggering weeks of back-and-forth — Shoken catches them at the moment of submission, before the claim ever enters the human review queue.
01
Agencies define the rules
Each agency configures allowability rules, budget categories, and invoice templates. Shoken enforces agency-specific requirements.
02
Provider uploads documentation in any format
Shoken — a closed, secure system — extracts and structures the data to align with agency invoice requirements. Line-by-line manual entry is eliminated.
03
Validation before submission
Each line item is validated against agency rules and the contract budget. Issues are flagged for resolution before submission.
04
Providers resolve issues in real time
Instead of waiting 20 days for a revision request, providers are alerted to errors immediately and fix them before submission. Shoken maintains the audit trail for maximum transparency.
05
Provider approves final invoice; Shoken submits to agency
Once the nonprofit approves the final invoice, Shoken routes it to the agency team, ready for review.
06
Agency staff maintain full approval authority
Shoken handles the tedious, manual comparison work. People keep judgment.
Twenty-day reviews are condensed to minutes.
Five rounds of revision become a single digital conversation.

See it on your own contracts.

We'll load a recent invoice of yours and show you the validation trace.
Request a demo