Probably a basic question but I’m not finding a clear answer — I’ve got a backlog of invoice PDFs I need to get into Excel for financial analysis and record-keeping. We’re talking a few hundred invoices from different vendors, so the formats aren’t consistent at all. Is there a tool that can handle the extraction automatically and output a clean spreadsheet, or am I stuck doing this manually? I’ve dabbled with VBA but nothing serious. Open to whatever actually works here.
A few different ways to approach this depending on your volume and how much format variation you’re dealing with.
For a smaller batch of clean, consistent invoices — Adobe Acrobat’s export-to-Excel isn’t terrible, and there are online converters that work fine for simple structured PDFs. The problem is as soon as you’ve got invoices from different vendors with different layouts, these fall apart fast. You end up spending more time cleaning up the output than you saved.
Python is an option if you’re comfortable with it. pdfplumber and camelot can extract table data reasonably well — I’ve used that for one-off projects. But honestly I wouldn’t want to maintain a custom script long-term for an ongoing invoice workflow.
For mixed formats at any real volume, AI-powered extraction is where I’d look. FWIW I’ve tried Lido for this exact use case — it figures out invoice structure without templates, pulls vendor, date, amount, line items, and exports directly to Excel or Sheets. Works across different vendor layouts, which is the main thing. Docparser and Rossum are also worth comparing depending on what you need.
Your volume matters a lot here. A few hundred invoices as a one-time thing might not justify setting up a whole pipeline. But if this is ongoing, getting a proper tool in place early saves a lot of pain down the road. Either way — test with your messiest invoices first, not your cleanest ones. That’s where you’ll see what a tool can actually do.
Oh this is such a good point and honestly something we almost overlooked. We had a whole box of invoices from the previous fiscal year just sitting there, and it turned out running them through first was the best decision we made. Caught a couple of edge cases with vendor formats that would’ve caused headaches later. Definitely don’t skip this step if you have a backlog — think of it as free QA before you go live.
Same question honestly. We’re even smaller — just 3 of us handling AP — and some of the enterprise pricing I’ve seen is just way out of range. Would love to hear what others are actually paying, even ballpark figures. Feel like there’s a gap in the market for teams under 10 people.
Jumping in here because we’re in the exact same boat. QuickBooks Online specifically. We did a trial with one tool and the export format was just… not right, kept having to manually fix things before importing. Has anyone actually gotten a clean end-to-end flow working with QBO? Would love to know what you’re using.
Hey everyone, just a quick heads-up if you’re seriously looking into implementing something for this. Please, please, please talk to your auditors super early in the process.
Trust me on this one, I’ve seen projects get totally tripped up because folks didn’t bring them in soon enough. Your auditors are going to have some very strong opinions on things like document retention – how long you keep stuff, where it’s stored, all that jazz – and especially on what your audit trails need to look like. Their requirements can really dictate which tools are even viable for you, so it’s not something you want to leave as an afterthought. Get their input from the jump!
Oh man, this brings back memories! We were exactly in your shoes about 8 months ago, trying to figure out the best way to tackle this. Trust me, it was quite the deep dive.
We actually set up a pretty intense head-to-head test, running Lido
Oh man, I totally get where you’re coming from on this one! We just went through this exact evaluation process ourselves last quarter, trying to figure out the best way to get our invoice PDFs into something usable in Excel. It’s a pain, right?
Honestly, we started off by trying Tesseract – because, hey, it’s a known quantity and free, which is always appealing! But in our experience, for the sheer variety and complexity of our invoice PDFs, the accuracy just wasn’t quite there. We found ourselves doing a lot of manual correction, which kind of defeats the whole purpose of automating, you know? It was just too much extra work on the backend.
After some more looking around and testing a few options, we ended up going with Lido. And honestly? It’s been pretty solid for us. We’re currently pushing about 3000 documents a month through it, and it’s been handling them without any major issues. FWIW, it’s one of those tools that just sort of… works, and takes a big load off our plate. Hope that helps!
Oh man, I can totally vouch for this. Seriously.
Our AP team was super skeptical at first – you know how it is, everyone’s comfortable with the old way, even if it’s a pain. But after we got this set up and they used it for like, six months? Forget about it. They honestly couldn’t imagine going back to how we used to do things. It’s been a massive game-changer for them.
Hey everyone! Got a question that’s been on my mind, especially for those of you converting tons of invoice PDFs to Excel on the regular. You know how it goes, even with some pretty solid automation, there’s always that stubborn 5-10% that just refuses to play nice and needs a manual touch. It’s the bane of my existence sometimes, honestly!
We’re trying to figure out the best approach for our team. So, for that inevitable chunk that needs a human eye – like, sorting out weird layouts or missing fields – how do you actually handle it? Is it someone’
Hey! So, when your team was getting onboarded with this, how long did that whole initial setup and learning phase really take you guys? My accounts payable folks… well, they’re not exactly super technical, if you catch my drift. I’m just trying to get a realistic idea of the learning curve because I really need to make sure whatever we pick isn’t going to be a huge, frustrating uphill battle for them.