Inventory and invoice conversion is easy

What are the best aspects of this product?

I like being able to have multiple document templates as each vendor tends to have their own "take" on what is useful to include in an invoice or order and formatting can vary a great deal.

Therefore, my templates are not based on vendor name - they are based on the data found in the invoices. Example file names: "line-qty-units-isbn13-desc-discount-level-ext-dollar" or "line-qty-desc-unit-ext-float"

Vendors aren't always consistent from invoice to invoice. They may be using software that resizes table columns to fit the text, which means you have to adjust your table format slightly each time to ensure the parsing is correct. That's easy to do.

The forums and Q&A resources are usually helpful and I've found them responsive to email.

What aspects are problematic or could work better?

1. The UI for making changes to the template. I hate the popup box routine at the end of making a change. It takes a lot of mouse clicks.

2. I've never gotten the subtemplates to work. (see note above about vendor formats being inconsistent.) Subtemplates "supposedly" help with minor variations. Maybe this works for other applications as it is a great idea.

3. There are a lot of little tweaks to be made that aren't obvious to improve character recognition. Why not start with the highest level of quality (ie. turn on OCR) at the start? If that makes file size a problem for storage or performance when processing a lot of files at once, walk people through how to "downgrade" to an acceptable level or establish a recommended number of files not to exceed some size limit. For example, during a trial scan there were no extra spaces or funky characters in the document but then I figured out about half of the "6s" had been transformed to "8s" - not terribly helpful. I want to be able to trust the result rather than having to proof hundreds of line items.

4. Given the inconsistencies I have with the input data sources, I don't think I'll be able to automate the parsing tasks - such as grabbing attachments from email automatically. Again, I have a small business, so I'm OK with the workaround.

What features/services would you like to see in future versions of this product?

a little less clunkiness in the editing interface (hard to describe ... it doesn't seem "modern")

the table parsing rules work pretty well. It would be nice to reorder them or copy a set and insert a rule between two existing ones. For example: column labels are always last in the list of applied rules. This makes sense, but simply copying an existing template doesn't really work if I need to add a rule. I have to delete the column labels and or other rules that need tweaking and (hopefully not forget something in the process) then recreate them.

What specific problems in your company were solved by this product?

Although I'd asked vendors for csv versions of invoices, most cannot provide them. They are geared to share pdf files. PDF to document converters are mostly crap and cutting and pasting the results into spreadsheets to upload to the POS inventory was tedious and prone to error.

This isn't a perfect fit since I still have to take the parsed files and manipulate them in Excel but that's reasonably quick to strip out extra content and swap around a few columns to fit the POS inventory format.

Are you a current user of this product?

Yes