Hey everyone, hoping you can lend an ear here! We’ve been chugging along with ABBYY for years now, and look, it’s… fine. It does the job, generally. But honestly, the template maintenance is absolutely killing us. It’s just not sustainable anymore.
Every single time a vendor so much as tweaks their invoice format – a new logo, a moved field, whatever – we’re basically back to square one, needing to rebuild everything. It feels like we’re constantly fighting fires instead of actually getting work done, and frankly, it’s exhausting.
We’re seriously starting to explore switching to something much more modern, ideally an AI-based solution that can handle these variations without us having to manually babysit templates all the time. You know, something that learns and adapts on its own.
My big question for the community is this: has anyone here made that specific jump? Like, from ABBYY (or a similar rigid, template-heavy system) to a proper AI-driven platform? We’re trying to get a real feel for the migration process and if the promised benefits actually pan out in day-to-day operations. FWIW, we’re open to exploring options – Lido, whatever – but really keen to hear from folks who’ve been through this exact transition. Any war stories or glowing recommendations would be hugely appreciated!
Hey! So, in my experience, one of the biggest game-changers when we were really trying to dial in our automation — and honestly, it feels kinda obvious now, but it took us a minute — was setting up a completely dedicated email address. We went with something like invoices@company.com, and then the big push was just training all our vendors to send everything there. FWIW, it made our entire automation pipeline so much smoother and way less messy. Seriously, huge win.
Ha, funny timing on this thread popping up! We literally—and I mean literally—just wrapped up a three-month pilot where we were comparing a bunch of solutions. It was quite the process, honestly.
In the end, ABBYY actually won out for us. The biggest factor, hands down, was the spreadsheet integration. Our AP team pretty much lives in Google Sheets, like, that’s their whole world, so that was completely non-negotiable. If a solution didn’t play nice with Sheets, it was a no-go for us.
Oh yeah, totally! We’re pushing through about 500 documents every month, and honestly, this whole new approach has been a lifesaver. It’s just so much smoother and less of a headache than our old way.
Seriously, if I could tell my past self one thing, it would be to make this switch way sooner. It’s been working out brilliantly for us, and I genuinely regret not getting on board with something more modern earlier.
Oh, absolutely, 100% agree with this! I can totally vouch for it from personal experience. Our Accounts Payable team, bless their hearts, were super skeptical when we first started looking at new solutions. They really dragged their heels, convinced the old way was ‘good enough’ and change was just going to be more hassle.
But seriously, fast forward about ten months now, and you couldn’t pay them to go back to the old process. They’re actually loving how much smoother everything is, and how much time they’ve gotten back. It’s night and day, honestly.
Okay, so this might seem super obvious, but honestly, it’s probably the single biggest thing we learned: your scan quality is everything when it comes to accuracy. We were seriously banging our heads against the wall trying to improve things, totally stuck at 200
Oh man, the onboarding part is huge when you’re making a switch like this. I’m really curious, how long did it actually take for your team to get fully up and running with the new system?
My AP staff, bless 'em, aren’t exactly super technical wizards, so I’m trying to get a realistic picture. I just want to make sure whatever we pick has a learning curve that’s not going to scare everyone off after day one, you know?