Analysing 1,12 million fuel and airport charge invoices across 31 airlines during 2024–2025, the research found that 40% of invoices still arrive as unstructured documents — paper, scanned PDFs, or email-attached PDFs — requiring manual data entry into financial systems.

Combined with chronically low rates of detailed invoice verification, Skymetrix estimates this contributes to an 'invisible surcharge' of $4.6 billion in undetected errors paid out by airlines globally each year — roughly an eighth of the industry's total net profit.

Key findings

• 40.3% of fuel and airport invoices arrive as paper or PDF, requiring manual data entry.
• There is a 3.6% error rate when humans type invoice data into a system (APQC Accounts Payable Benchmarking), which means one in 28 entries of any paper invoice will be wrong.
• The industry is polarised: 7 airlines had paper rates below 10%; 10 had rates above 50%.
• Teams typically verify only 10–20% of invoices in detail; the majority of errors are paid without challenge.
• On average, invoicing errors amount to 1% of direct operating costs, which equates to a $4.6 billion problem for the industry.

In response, Skymetrix has launched AI Invoice Automation — a touchless invoicing solution designed to help airlines eliminate manual invoice processing, improve verification accuracy, and reduce operational leakage at scale.

"Airlines operate the most advanced machines on earth, yet 40% of the invoices those operations generate still arrive in formats that a computer cannot read. Once an invoice has to be re-keyed, error becomes statistically inevitable — and once it reaches the ledger, the cost of fixing it disappears into the noise. The 'invisible surcharge' is the financial consequence." — Michael Scheidler, CEO, Skymetrix