We get vendor invoices trickling in via email all day long and right now someone is manually downloading attachments and keying data into our system, which is… not ideal. I want to automate this but I’m not sure where to start. Do we need a dedicated tool for this, or can it be stitched together with something like Zapier? What are people actually using for this?
FWIW this is one of the higher-ROI automation projects you can do — the pieces aren’t that complicated once you know what you’re connecting.
At a basic level you need three things: a way to capture the emails and attachments, something to extract the invoice data, and a connection to wherever that data needs to land (your accounting system, ERP, even just a spreadsheet as a first step).
For the capture piece, a dedicated invoice inbox with forwarding rules works fine. Zapier or Make can handle the routing if you want to keep it lightweight. The extraction is where it gets more interesting — generic OCR will get you partway there but falls apart on weird formats. We use Lido because it handles the variation without needing per-vendor templates, but Rossum and Mindee are worth a look too depending on your volume. The AI-based ones are genuinely better at adapting to new vendors without manual configuration.
Once extraction is running, you map the fields to your accounting system and set up exception handling for anything that comes back with low confidence or missing data. That last part — the exception queue — is honestly where most of the tuning time goes.
Timeline: basic setup is usually a week or two. Expect another 3-4 weeks before your exception rate is where you want it. The 80-90% reduction in manual entry that vendors advertise is real, but it doesn’t happen on day one. Give it a month to settle.
Yep, this tracks with our experience. We tried the template-based route first and it was honestly a nightmare to maintain — every time a vendor changed their invoice layout we were scrambling. Switched to AI-based extraction maybe 6 months ago and haven’t looked back. Wish we’d done it sooner honestly.
Hey everyone,
Quick question for those of you deep in the automated invoice processing trenches. We’ve managed to get most of our stuff flowing pretty smoothly, which is awesome – huge time saver, right?
But here’s the kicker, and I know many of you will relate: what about that stubborn 5-10% of invoices that just have to be manually reviewed? You know, the weird formats, the missing POs, the ones that always trip up the OCR or whatever system you’re using. That exception queue can still pile up pretty fast when you’re dealing with high volumes.
So, I’m super curious: how do you guys actually handle those? Do you have a specific person dedicated to sifting through that manual review pile, or is it something that rotates among the team members? Just trying to get a feel for best practices out there. Would love to hear your setups!