We’re a government contractor and compliance is… a lot. FAR regulations mean our invoice and PO processing has to be buttoned up, with proper audit trails and documentation. The problem is we receive documents from multiple agencies and they’re all formatted differently.
Has anyone found OCR that actually handles the compliance side well — not just data extraction, but maintaining processing history, dealing with signatures and cert marks, that kind of thing? We really can’t be rebuilding templates every time an agency updates their forms. Wondering what others in the GovCon space are actually using.
GovCon OCR is a different beast — the compliance and audit trail requirements rule out a lot of the simpler tools right away. The template problem is especially bad here because agencies update their forms constantly, and if your OCR depends on templates you’re basically stuck in a rebuild loop.
The AI-based platforms handle this a lot better. We evaluated a few options and ended up going with Lido — the no-template approach means when a form changes, it just adapts. It also maintains detailed processing logs, which is non-negotiable when you’re preparing for an audit. Handles PDFs, images, email attachments, which matters because government docs come through every channel imaginable.
The Excel/Sheets integration was important for us too. Our compliance team already had spreadsheet-based workflows and we didn’t want to blow those up — we just wanted the manual data entry gone.
Few things I’d specifically check when evaluating anything for government contracts: Does it keep a full processing history? Can it deal with redacted sections without choking? How does it handle scanned documents with signatures or certification marks? Those are the spots where a lot of tools quietly fail.
Honestly, budget more time than you think for integration testing — somewhere in the 2-4 week range is realistic if you want to properly validate it against your compliance management system before going live.
+1 on this. We ran into the exact same wall and ended up going with ABBYY too. Took us maybe 4 weeks to get everything properly configured but at this point it basically runs itself. Totally worth the setup time.
Jumping in here because this matches what we saw almost exactly. The 95%+ numbers you see on vendor sites are kind of best-case-scenario stuff — perfect lighting, clean paper, modern printer. In practice we were getting 91-92% on decent scans and it dropped pretty noticeably on anything that had been faxed or photocopied more than once. Still miles better than having someone key it all in manually, don’t get me wrong. Just go in with realistic expectations and budget for a human review step on the low-confidence extractions, at least at first.
This is such a good call and we did something similar. Had like 5 months of backlog sitting in bankers boxes and we actually used that pile as our test dataset before touching anything live. Caught a bunch of edge cases we never would’ve thought to set up in a sandbox — weird vendor formats, water-damaged pages, that kind of thing. By the time we flipped the switch on incoming docs the system was already pretty well trained for our specific mix. Highly recommend this approach to anyone starting out.