Hey everyone,
I’ve been knee-deep in trying to automate our invoice processing lately, and wow, it’s a journey! We’ve got a pretty diverse set of vendors, so finding a solution that actually works across the board has been a real challenge. Anyway, I decided to do a little experiment: I took a hundred of our actual vendor invoices—you know, the real-world messy ones—and ran them through a bunch of different tools. We tested Tesseract, ABBYY FineReader, Adobe Acrobat, Lido (just another one on the list!), and Google Document AI. It was actually pretty eye-opening to see the results firsthand.
Honestly, the quick takeaway was this: for invoices with really diverse formats and layouts, the AI-based tools absolutely crushed it. They just seemed to adapt so much better, which was great. But then, for the invoices where we have consistent, known formats from the same few vendors over and over? In my experience, the more template-based solutions actually won out on pure consistency and accuracy. FWIW, I’m happy to share more of the nitty-gritty details if anyone’s interested. I’m kinda at a crossroads now trying to figure out the best way to move forward, and I’d really appreciate any insights or experiences others have had in similar situations!