More efficient processing of received invoices thanks to the use of multiple extraction services

Automatic data extraction from tax documents (invoices, receipts, etc.) saves companies a huge amount of time. Unfortunately, it does not always work flawlessly. Our iNVOiCE FLOW cloud solution therefore offers three different extraction services, the combination of which eliminates problem invoices. This increases the success rate of extraction.

How extraction services work in general

Extraction services are used to digitize the receipt of tax documents (most often invoices or receipts) in unstructured formats - typically PDF, PNG, JPEG, ISDOC or TIFF.

In practice, it works in such a way that the company sets up a dedicated e-mail inbox, which it connects to the extraction service. As soon as a document arrives in this mailbox, the extraction service uses recognition technologies (most often OCR, OMR or ICR) to automatically read the data from the document, extract it and forward it to the information or accounting system.

In addition to extraction itself, other related services can be used, such as approval workflow, electronic archiving of documents or connection to accounting systems.

Extraction services are unfortunately not 100% reliable

The complication, however, is that the aforementioned recognition technologies do not have a 100% success rate. It happens that after extraction, an employee must manually check the data from the document and, if necessary, supplement or correct it. At the same time, the majority of errors most often occur repeatedly with invoices from one or a few suppliers, which the extraction service simply cannot deal with.

In such a situation, the company has two options.

1. Either accept that the extraction service will always extract a certain amount of invoices with errors and employees will be forced to manually check and correct these documents,
2. or switch to a better (and therefore more expensive) extraction service that can handle "problem" invoices better.

At the same time, both of these choices mean an increase in the cost of extracting documents, which can threaten the financial meaningfulness of the entire project.

You now have the option of combining several services at the same time

At GRiT, we respond to this situation and offer a choice of three extraction services simultaneously as part of the iNVOiCE FLOW solution. With the fact that you do not have to apply one service to all documents, but you can mix them according to individual needs.

Since all three services guarantee about the same high extraction success rate, it will be best for you to choose the cheapest one to start with. Over time, you will then identify suppliers from which document items are repeatedly extracted with errors. Based on this information, we will analyze the documents of "problem" suppliers, test them through other extraction services and propose for these documents one that can handle them better.

However, you only apply this second extraction service to "problem" documents, i.e. if the given service is more expensive, it will not affect the total extraction costs as much. Thanks to this approach, the success rate of extracting documents is increasing and it is starting to make sense even for those companies that have so far avoided extraction due to the error rate.

Even when combining multiple extraction services, you have everything under the heading of one cloud solution, and from the user's position, you do not feel that the software in the background is working with several different services.

If you want to know more about iNVOiCE FLOW or try it out, please let us know. We will be happy to show you how it works in other companies and answer any questions.

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