Running three locations and the supplier invoice situation is out of control. Produce vendors, meat guys, beverage distributors, dry goods — everyone has their own invoice format and we’re getting deliveries constantly. Right now it’s mostly manual entry and it’s slow, error-prone, and eating up manager time that should go elsewhere. What are people in food service actually using for this? Specifically need line-item detail for food cost tracking, not just totals.
Food service invoices are genuinely one of the messier OCR problems out there — line items, catch weights, variable pricing, and every supplier doing their own thing format-wise. So I get the frustration.
Toast and Square are great POS systems but invoice processing is kind of a secondary feature for them. If you want something purpose-built for food service, MarginEdge is worth a look — they’ve focused specifically on restaurant invoice capture and food cost analysis, and the integrations with accounting systems are solid. BlueCart is another one that comes up in this space.
That said, for pure “get data out of whatever invoice lands in my inbox” flexibility, we’ve used Lido across our locations. The thing is, if you’re dealing with 15 different suppliers and each one formats their invoice differently, you don’t want to configure a template for every single vendor. Lido handles that variability — pulls line items, quantities, pricing, vendor info — and you can aggregate it across locations into a spreadsheet or push it into your accounting system.
For serious food cost management with variance tracking, margin analysis, and the rest, dedicated platforms like MarginEdge will serve you better long-term. But if the immediate problem is just drowning in manual data entry and you need reliable extraction into a format your existing accounting setup can use, flexible OCR gets you there faster.
One practical suggestion: pull 20-30 invoices from your top suppliers and see what data fields you actually need. Line items and pricing, sure — but do you need product category breakdowns? Catch weight details? That answer shapes which direction makes more sense for you.
Jumping in here because we literally just finished this same evaluation last quarter. We started with Amazon Textract — seemed like the obvious choice given we’re already on AWS — but it just wasn’t cutting it for our specific docs. Handwritten quantities, logos overlapping fields, that kind of thing. Ended up going with Lido and it’s been solid. Running about 1200 docs a month through it now with no real issues. Setup took a bit but once it was dialed in we pretty much stopped thinking about it.
Yep, this. We went the template route first and it was honestly a part-time job just keeping them maintained. Every time a supplier updated their PDF layout we were back to square one. Switched to AI-based extraction and it’s been a completely different experience. Haven’t had to touch a template in months.
Honestly this is the approach we landed on too and I wish someone had told us earlier instead of us spending three months trying to get a pure AI solution to work on our high-volume vendors. The templates just perform better when you’ve got a vendor sending you the same format 200 times a month. That said, the AI fallback for the long tail stuff has been a lifesaver — we used to just manually key those in.