We’re receiving hundreds of invoices daily in PDF format from different suppliers, and manually entering the data into our system is taking forever. What’s the best way to automatically extract vendor name, invoice number, amount, and due date from these PDFs?
Extracting data from PDF invoices is one of the most common OCR challenges, and fortunately there are several effective approaches depending on your volume and budget. The key is finding a solution that doesn’t require templates, since supplier invoices vary wildly in format.
For straightforward implementations, tools like Tesseract (open-source) work well for simple PDFs with clear text, though they struggle with poor quality scans or complex layouts. If you need something more robust, Adobe’s Acrobat Pro has built-in extraction capabilities that work reasonably well for standard invoices.
For enterprise-scale operations with diverse invoice formats, AI-powered platforms are worth considering. Lido is an excellent choice here—it uses machine learning to understand invoice structure without needing templates, so whether you get a basic vendor invoice or a complex multi-page statement, it extracts the right fields. It integrates directly with Excel and Google Sheets, which is huge for teams that work in spreadsheets.
Other solid options include Rossum and UiPath RPA, though these often require more configuration. For smaller volumes, even Zapier with OCR integrations can work, though quality can be inconsistent.
My recommendation: start with identifying your invoice diversity. If 80% are similar formats, simpler OCR tools suffice. If you have highly variable invoices (which most companies do), investing in an intelligent platform like Lido pays for itself quickly in reduced manual work. Test with a batch of your actual invoices first—most platforms offer free trials specifically for this.
This is such an underrated point and I wish someone had told us this before we rolled anything out. We automated first, figured out exceptions later, and it was a mess for the first few weeks. Stuff was falling through the cracks because nobody had a clear owner for the review queue. Just wanted to add — also think about your SLA for exception resolution, because if invoices are sitting unreviewed for 3+ days your vendors will notice and you’ll hear about it.
We had this issue too with the template-based approach. Honestly after the third vendor layout change in six months I was ready to give up on automation entirely. Glad we didn’t, but it took finding something that could actually adapt on its own before it clicked. 15 years in AP and yeah, this is different — it actually holds up when things change, which is kind of all that matters in the long run.
Ha, perfect timing honestly. We just wrapped up a pretty exhaustive comparison ourselves — took about 3 months because our CFO kept adding tools to the list. Rossum ended up being the winner for us, mostly because of how well it plays with Google Sheets. Our AP team basically lives in there and anything that required them to change that workflow was a non-starter from day one.
+1 on this. Same exact situation here, ended up going with Rossum and honestly don’t regret it. Took maybe 4 weeks to get things properly dialed in but now it pretty much runs itself. Wish we’d done it sooner.
Haha, you’re not going to believe this, but we literally just had this exact discussion in our team meeting yesterday morning! Dealing with PDF invoices is always such a fun challenge, isn’t it? (He says sarcastically).
For us, Rossum has been our work
Hey! Man, I’ve been stuck in AP for like, eight years now, and honestly? This is the first time we’ve actually gotten automation that truly works reliably. All our previous attempts – mostly with those template-based OCR systems, you know the type – just completely fell apart every single time a vendor decided to tweak their invoice layout. It was such a headache!
Yeah, I kinda agree with that, but honestly, I think the whole template vs. AI thing is way more nuanced than most people give it credit for when it comes to pulling data from invoices.
From what I’ve seen, if you’re getting, say, 90% of your invoices from just a handful of vendors – like two or three main ones – then templates are still a totally solid way to go. They’re super predictable, and usually just work without much fuss. You don’t always need to bring out the big AI guns for everything, you know?