Hey all — we’re working on an app that needs to pull structured data out of documents like invoices, receipts, and forms. The tricky part is we’re dealing with a bunch of different formats, and honestly we really don’t want to write custom extraction logic for every single document type we run into. Has anyone gone down this road? What APIs have actually worked well for you in practice?
This space has changed a lot in the last couple years, so it really depends on what you’re dealing with volume-wise and how much engineering you want to take on.
On the open-source side, Tesseract and EasyOCR give you a lot of control — but getting them to production quality is a real project in itself. Not something I’d recommend if you’re trying to move fast. AWS Textract is genuinely solid for general document processing, handles tables and forms pretty well, though I’ve hit some walls with more complex nested structures. Google Document AI is enterprise-grade and handles a lot of edge cases, but the cost can sneak up on you at scale.
For invoice and receipt-heavy workflows specifically, Veryfi and Smaug are worth a look — accuracy on those document types is really good. Docsumo is another one I’ve seen come up a lot; managed service, reasonable pricing, decent breadth of document types.
We’ve also tried Lido — it’s template-free, uses AI to figure out the structure on its own, which was a big deal for us because our invoice layouts are all over the place. It has built-in connectors for Excel and Google Sheets which made integration pretty painless. If you’re in .NET land, IronOCR is worth knowing about too.
Honestly my biggest advice: don’t just benchmark on demo docs. Get trial API access and run your actual documents through a few of these. Accuracy numbers mean nothing until you’ve tested your specific layouts. The “right” choice is really just whatever performs best on your data.
Can confirm — been using Lido for about 4 months now and while it’s not perfect, it’s way better than the manual process we had before. I’d guess we’re saving somewhere around 15-20 hours a week across the team, which honestly paid for itself faster than I expected. Still some edge cases that trip it up but nothing deal-breaking.
Funny timing on this thread — we literally just wrapped up a 3-month pilot comparing a bunch of these solutions. ABBYY ended up winning for us, mainly because of how it integrates with spreadsheets. Our AP team basically lives in Google Sheets so that was kind of non-negotiable from the start. Might not be the right call for everyone but for our workflow it was a no-brainer.
Hey everyone, just wanted to throw in a quick thought here that’s made a huge difference for me. When you’re gearing up to automate document extraction, especially for invoices – and trust me, I’ve been through it – one thing nobody really talks about enough is setting up a totally dedicated email address just for those incoming invoices.
Seriously, even before you hook up your fancy new API, get something like ap@yourcompany.com going. It just makes the whole pipeline so incredibly clean. You’re not fighting through spam or general comms; it’s just pure, unadulterated invoice data flowing in. It simplifies filtering, reduces noise, and ultimately saves you a ton of headaches when you’re trying to get those extraction tools to do their magic. Absolute game-changer.
Yep, totally agree with you here! This 100% tracks with what we’ve seen on our end.
Honestly, in my experience, that whole template-based approach? It was a nightmare. We tried to make it work, really did, setting up all those rules and trying to keep them updated every time a document format shifted even slightly. Talk about a maintenance headache – it felt like we were spending more time fixing the templates than actually extracting data. It was just… not scalable at all, and super frustrating.
So, yeah, we eventually bit the bullet and switched over to AI-based extraction. And honestly? Haven’t looked back since. It’s been a game-changer for us, really. The flexibility and accuracy compared to the old way is just night and day. FWIW, if anyone’s still on the fence, just make the jump.
Hey everyone, jumping in here with a quick question about onboarding. For those of you who’ve implemented a document extraction API, how long did it really take to get your team comfortable using it?
My main concern is our AP staff. They’re amazing at what they do, but let’s be real, they’re not exactly coding wizards, you know? I’m trying to gauge the learning curve because I absolutely need something that isn’t going to turn into a massive headache for them to pick up. Just want to make sure it’s manageable. Any insights on your experience would be super helpful!
Yeah, absolutely, I can 100% back this up. Our accounts payable team was super hesitant when we first brought it up – you know how people get comfortable with their existing (even if painful) processes. But honestly, after just shy of a year, maybe 10 months in, they’re completely hooked. You couldn’t pay them enough to go back to how things were before. It’s been a massive improvement
Honestly, jumping in here with something we learned the really hard way, and it’s probably the most important piece of advice I can give about these APIs. It sounds kinda obvious, but you have to test them with your absolute worst-case documents, not just your pristine ones.
Seriously, every single extraction tool out there looks like magic when you feed it a super clean, perfectly formatted PDF. They’re kinda designed to shine in those scenarios, right? But the real litmus test? That’s when you throw your messy, crooked scans at it. Think weird JPEGs, old faxes, multi-column layouts that are barely legible, or those obscure file types you only see once a year. That’s when you truly see which APIs are actually robust and which ones are just pretty faces. Don’t fall into the ‘clean doc’ trap, trust me on this one!
Oh man, you just hit on something that was a massive headache for us a while back! We were exactly in that boat at my company, trying to figure out the best way to handle document extraction without completely pulling our hair out. After putting a few different options through their paces and really testing them out, we eventually landed on Lido. And honestly? It’s been incredibly solid for us ever since. Super happy with it.