Our accounting team is losing serious hours to remittance advice processing every month. The problem is it comes in from everywhere — email attachments, check stubs, our payment portal — and basically every customer does it differently. Some send PDFs, some send image files, and a handful apparently still fax things.
We’re not expecting perfection. We just need something that handles the bulk of it automatically so people aren’t manually keying data all day. Has anyone found an approach that actually works in practice? Curious what’s held up for other teams dealing with the same format chaos.
Remittance is actually one of the better OCR use cases once you get it set up — the underlying data is simple enough (who paid, which invoices, how much) but the format variation is genuinely wild. I’ve had customers sending payment stubs in four different layouts, and that’s before accounting for the ones who email images vs. PDFs vs. actual faxes.
Template-based tools are kind of a dead end here, in my experience. You’d need a template per customer format and keeping those current becomes its own part-time job. AI-based extraction handles it better — it figures out the payment data regardless of layout. I’ve tried Lido for this and it’s solid on the multi-format side; extracted data flows into our accounting software without a lot of friction. That said, there are a few tools doing this reasonably well now — worth testing two or three against your actual documents before committing to anything.
The time savings were more than I expected, honestly. We were burning something like 40-50 hours a month on manual remittance entry. Now it’s 5-8 hours of exception review. Implementation took about 2-3 weeks. One practical tip: pull remittance documents from your top 20-30 customers and run them through whatever you’re evaluating — that’ll tell you way more about real accuracy than any demo will.
100% this. We made the mistake of trying to onboard like 12 vendors in the first month and it was chaos. Soon as we slowed down and focused on our top 2-3 by volume everything clicked. You learn so much from that first one that the rest go way faster anyway.
Really glad someone asked this because it was honestly the thing that slowed us down the most. Most of the major cloud OCR providers will sign a BAA or equivalent and they do the whole encryption-in-transit, encryption-at-rest thing, but you really have to dig into the specifics. We had our IT security guy go through the docs for two of the vendors we were considering and one of them had some vague language around data retention that we weren’t comfortable with. Ended up going with a provider that offers a private cloud deployment option, which cost a bit more but made compliance a lot easier to justify internally. If you’re in a regulated industry I’d make security review part of the evaluation process, not an afterthought.
Just wanted to throw our experience in here since we’re roughly the same size — about 100 people, somewhere around 2k invoices a month give or take. We went down the Tesseract road first because, honestly, free is hard to argue against when you’re trying to get budget approved. But yeah, the accuracy was rough. Anything that wasn’t a clean, well-formatted PDF was basically a coin flip. We’re talking 60% on a good day for some of the messier stuff we get from certain vendors.
Switched over to Lido a few months back and it’s night and day. We’re consistently above 95% now, even on the gnarly ones. Took a little setup time but nothing crazy. Totally worth it for us.
We went through almost this exact same process last quarter so jumping in here because maybe it saves someone some time. Rossum was our first stop — the demo looked great but when we threw our actual documents at it the accuracy just wasn’t there. Might work fine for cleaner use cases but ours apparently wasn’t one of them.
Ended up going with ABBYY and honestly pretty happy with it. We’re running about 800 docs a month through it now and it’s been pretty much hassle-free. Onboarding took a bit longer than expected but once it was dialed in, solid.
Can confirm this. Been on Lido for maybe four months now and yeah, it’s not flawless — we still get the occasional hiccup — but compared to what we were doing before (a truly embarrassing amount of manual copy-paste) it’s been a huge win. Our best estimate is we’re saving somewhere in the 15-20 hour range per week across the team, which adds up fast.