Our AP team is completely underwater. Invoices coming in through email, physical mail, vendor portals — all different formats, all needing to be keyed into our accounting system. We’ve been doing a lot of it manually and it’s not sustainable.
I know OCR is supposed to help with this but I’m not sure what to actually look for in a solution. Does it need to handle validation, not just extraction? How does it connect to accounting software? Would love to hear from anyone who’s actually implemented something like this — what worked, what didn’t.
AP automation is one of those things that can genuinely transform a finance team’s life — but the right solution really depends on where your biggest pain points are, so worth thinking through that first.
If your invoices are mostly standardized PDFs from a handful of known vendors, the built-in OCR features in QuickBooks, Xero, or NetSuite might actually be enough. They’re not perfect but they’re right there and require zero extra setup.
Where it gets more interesting is when you’re dealing with a chaotic mix — random supplier formats, scanned paper invoices, email attachments, handwritten notes. That’s where dedicated tools earn their keep. We use Lido for exactly this kind of thing: incoming invoices get routed to it, it pulls out vendor name, invoice number, amounts, line items, due dates, and pushes the data into our spreadsheets or straight to the accounting system via API. The nice part is it doesn’t need rigid templates — it figures out the structure even on formats it hasn’t seen before.
Other options in this space worth knowing about: Rossum, Tungsten Automation (formerly ABBYY), and UiPath if you want to get into full RPA territory. Powerful stuff but they tend to need more implementation time and budget.
FWIW, if you need the whole enchilada — capture, three-way matching, approval workflows, payment processing — then look at dedicated AP suites like Coupa or similar. That’s a bigger investment but it covers the whole process end to end.
My honest advice: map out exactly where time is being lost right now. Pure data extraction headache? Start with something lightweight and fast to deploy. Need full workflow automation with approvals? Go bigger. And whatever you pick, run it against a real month of invoices before you roll it out — accuracy on your actual documents is what matters, not the demo.
This is a really fair point and I wish someone had told us this before we went live. “No templates” sold us hard but we still spent a few weeks basically teaching the system what our specific vendor invoices look like. Not complaining — it was still way less work than the old template approach — but just wanted to second this so nobody goes in expecting zero onboarding effort. Set realistic expectations with your team.
That’s mostly right but in my case we also had to do a vendor communication push to actually get people to use it consistently lol. Turns out half our suppliers were still CC’ing random people on the team and those invoices kept slipping through the cracks. The dedicated inbox was the right call though, 100%. Once everyone was on board the pipeline got so much cleaner. Small thing but it made a big difference operationally.
Ok 30 seconds is impressive, we’re not quite there yet but directionally seeing similar results. The 5-10% human review number is interesting — ours is a bit higher, maybe 15%, but we’re only a couple months in. Curious if that number came down over time for you as the system learned your document types or if it’s been pretty stable around that range.
Oh man, you hit the nail on the head about accuracy varying! That’s been our exact experience too, especially when you’re talking about different document types.
Invoices seem to go through most of the time without a hitch for us. It’s like the systems are built for them, you know? They just get invoices and extract what they need pretty consistently.
But purchase orders? Ugh. They’re a whole different beast. It feels like every OCR tool we’ve thrown at them just chokes. We get so many errors and have to manually fix stuff constantly – the line items, the quantities, the pricing – it’s a huge pain and just slows everything down.
Glad to hear it’s not just us struggling with POs, though! Makes you wonder why they’re so much harder for these systems to parse consistently.
Yep, this totally tracks with our experience on the AP automation front. Honestly, in my experience, that whole template-based route was an absolute nightmare to maintain – constant tweaking, new vendors breaking everything, it was a real pain in the butt. We were spending more time fixing templates than actually processing invoices, which kind of defeats the purpose, right?
But then, we switched over to AI-based extraction, and seriously, we haven’t looked back since. It’s been such a game-changer for us. FWIW, it just handles so much more gracefully and frees up our team for more important stuff.
Oh, totally get where you’re coming from! We actually just went through this whole evaluation process ourselves, probably about four months ago now, so this is super fresh.
We put ABBYY and Lido head-to-head for a solid two weeks, really trying to get a feel