Hey everyone, hoping you can lend some wisdom here! My company is pretty global – we’re talking invoices rolling in from all over, so we deal with USD, EUR, GBP, JPY, and a bunch of other currencies, honestly, it’s a never-ending list sometimes.
The big headache we’re running into is with our current (and past) OCR tools. In my experience, most of them seem to make this wild assumption that every single invoice is going to be in one, consistent currency. It’s like they’re built for a simpler world! This obviously doesn’t work for us when we’ve got a single batch that could have five different currencies. We need to extract the amounts and then convert them accurately, and it feels like we’re constantly fighting the tools.
So, I’m genuinely curious: for those of you working in similar global environments, what’s your secret sauce? How are you guys actually handling multi-currency extraction and conversion? Are there specific tools that just get it, or is it more about a clever workflow you’ve built? Any insights or suggestions would be a huge help!
Honestly, everyone’s always super focused on the automation part itself when it comes to OCR and multi-currency invoices, which totally makes sense. But one thing I feel like nobody ever really hammers home — and trust me, in my experience, it’s a game-changer — is getting your exception handling workflow nailed down before you even start automating.
Seriously, you need to know exactly what’s going to happen when the OCR inevitably gets something wrong. Because it will happen. Whether it’s a weird currency symbol, a poorly scanned invoice, or just some unexpected formatting, the system isn’t going to be 100% perfect all the time, especially with the complexities of multi-currency. So, FWIW, figure out your fallback plan, who reviews it, and how errors are corrected first. Having that solid process in place before you flick the automation switch will save you so many headaches down the line.
Oh man, talk about funny timing on this thread! Honestly, we literally just wrapped up a pretty intense three-month pilot where we were comparing a bunch of different solutions for exactly this kind of thing.
And FWIW, Lido actually won out for us. It wasn’t perfect, but the main reason it stood head and shoulders above the rest was its spreadsheet integration. Our AP team, bless their hearts, practically lives in Google Sheets for everything, so having that seamless connection was honestly a total non-negotiable for us – like, seriously, we couldn’t even consider something that didn’t play nice there.