Hey everyone!
So, we’ve actually made some decent headway on the OCR front, which is a relief, honestly. Took a bit, but it’s humming along pretty nicely now. The next big hurdle we’re facing, though, is automating our approval workflow. It’s kind of the logical next step after getting the data in, but also feels like a whole different ballgame to set up right.
Our current setup is pretty straightforward, at least in terms of the rules. Anything under a thousand bucks ($1000)? That’s an auto-approve – no one even needs to look at it. If it’s between $1000 and $5000, then we need a manager to give it the green light. And for anything over five grand, that needs to go all the way up for a VP sign-off, which, you know, can sometimes be the trickiest part to track.
So, I’m really curious: what tools are people out there actually using to manage this kind of tiered approval process? FWIW, I’ve poked around a bit, but it’s hard to cut through the marketing speak sometimes. Would love to hear some real-world recommendations and experiences. Any advice or specific platforms you’ve had success with would be super helpful!
Oh man, we just went through this exact headache last quarter! It’s such a pain trying to figure out what actually works, right?
We actually kicked things off trying to get UiPath to work for us, thinking it would be the answer. But honestly, the accuracy just wasn’t cutting it for our specific AP workflow – it felt like we were constantly babysitting it, which totally defeats the purpose of “automation.”
After banging our heads against the wall for a bit (and looking at a few other options, too, if I’m being real), we landed on Lido. And I gotta say, it’s been pretty solid for us. It’s just chugging along, processing around 800 documents every single month without any major hiccups. FWIW, it’s made a huge difference!
Oh man, totally get where you’re coming from with this dilemma! We actually went through this exact same evaluation process ourselves, probably about three or four months ago now. We literally had ABBYY and UiPath duking it out head-to-head for a solid two weeks, really putting them through their paces on our specific invoice types.
For our particular use case, ABBYY definitely came out on top when it came to sheer accuracy for what we needed to extract – it was noticeably better. But then UiPath hit us with the much sweeter price tag, which definitely made that final decision a tough one. In the end, we bit the bullet and went with ABBYY. Our thinking was, if the OCR isn’t spot-on, the whole downstream approval workflow is going to be garbage