Okay so we’re basically drowning right now. Invoices, intake forms, contracts — everything’s coming in from different places and someone on the team is manually keying it all in. It’s unsustainable. We’ve been looking at automation options but honestly half of them seem like they’d take months just to set up properly. Anyone been through this and found something that didn’t require a huge implementation project to get off the ground?
Been there. Manual data entry is one of those things that sounds manageable until suddenly it isn’t — and by then you’ve got a backlog, errors in the system, and burned-out staff who are way too skilled to be typing numbers into spreadsheets all day.
Honestly the landscape breaks down pretty clearly by how much pain you want upfront. On one end you’ve got Excel macros + OCR (free, fragile, you’ll hate it within a month), Zapier for simple stuff, and Power Automate if you’re already deep in Microsoft. These are fine for narrow use cases. Then there’s the heavy-duty RPA stuff — UiPath, Blue Prism, Automation Anywhere — which are genuinely powerful but expect to involve IT and budget real time for setup.
For teams that just want to stop the bleeding fast, I’ve had better luck with AI-powered document processors. The big advantage is they don’t need you to build templates for every document type — they figure out the structure on their own. We use Lido for the extraction layer: invoices, receipts, POs, whatever comes in. It pulls the data and pushes it to our spreadsheets or systems without us touching it. Setup was days, not weeks.
The math is pretty hard to argue with. If someone’s spending even three or four hours a day on data entry, you’re looking at real money. Most of these tools pay for themselves almost immediately.
My suggestion: solve extraction first — that’s where the time actually goes — then layer workflow automation (approvals, notifications, etc.) on top once the data’s clean and moving.
Same here, we’re a similar size and pricing was the first thing I looked at too. Honestly the per-page pricing models can sneak up on you if you have high volume months. We ended up going with a flat monthly subscription just for the predictability. Would def recommend asking vendors for a volume estimate before you commit to anything.
This is such a good point and I feel like nobody talks about it. We had a backlog too — probably closer to a year’s worth if I’m being honest — and using it as a test batch before going fully live was kind of accidental genius on our part. Caught a bunch of edge cases we never would’ve thought to test for. The Lido processing on those older invoices also helped us set realistic accuracy expectations with management, which made the rollout go a lot smoother.