Okay, maybe I should already know this, but — what’s actually the difference between IDP and OCR? I keep seeing them used like they’re the same thing, and then other times people treat them as totally separate. Is one a subset of the other? When would you pick one over the other? Genuinely confused.
The confusion makes sense — the overlap is real, which is why people conflate them all the time.
OCR (Optical Character Recognition) is the narrow thing: it reads text from an image and converts it into machine-readable characters. That’s basically it. It’s been around forever and works well on clean, printed, structured documents. Throw handwriting at it, or a weird scan angle, or a slightly different layout than it expects — it starts to struggle.
IDP — Intelligent Document Processing — is the bigger umbrella. It uses OCR as one component, but layers ML, NLP, and business logic on top. So instead of just handing you a blob of extracted text, it understands what the document actually is, pulls out the relevant fields, validates them, and can route the document based on what it found. There’s a meaningful difference between “here are all the words on this invoice” and “here is the invoice number, total, due date, and vendor, structured and validated.”
In my experience, traditional OCR makes sense if you’ve got highly standardized documents and you’ve already invested in building templates and workflows around them. If that’s working, don’t fix what isn’t broken.
Honestly though, for most orgs dealing with real-world document variety, IDP is just more practical. Template maintenance gets old fast. Platforms like Lido handle diverse document types without that upfront configuration overhead — and a few others do too. That operational difference compounds over time.
The cost gap has also narrowed a lot. IDP used to feel like a premium product. It doesn’t as much anymore. For most teams, it’s the better long-term bet.
Jumping in here because this mirrors our situation almost exactly. We tested maybe three or four options and ended up on Rossum as well. The no-template thing was honestly the dealbreaker for us — we’re dealing with 40-something different vendors and maintaining individual templates was just not realistic. Setup took a bit of time but the consistency we’re getting now is way better than before.
Funny timing honestly, we just wrapped up a pretty long pilot — like three months — comparing a bunch of these solutions. Lido ended up winning for us, mostly because of the spreadsheet integration. That might sound like a small thing but our AP team basically lives in Google Sheets so it was kind of non-negotiable. The other tools we looked at had better bells and whistles in some areas but if the handoff to Sheets is clunky your team just won’t use it.
Okay, so this isn’t directly about IDP vs. OCR differences, but it’s a huge pre-automation pro tip that I swear no one talks about enough, and it makes a world of difference once you actually implement your solution. Before you even think about connecting your IDP or OCR tool to your incoming documents, stop for a second and set up a completely dedicated email address just for those specific types of docs. I’m talking something like invoices@yourcompany.com or ap@yourcompany.com.
Seriously, trust me on this one. Trying to run your fancy new automation through a general inbox where other emails are landing turns into a total mess incredibly fast. Having that single, clean inbox for all your invoices – or whatever document type you’re automating – just makes the entire pipeline so much smoother. It’s easier to track, easier to troubleshoot, and prevents so many headaches down the road. It feels like a small thing, but it’s a game-changer for keeping your automated processes clean and efficient.