Extracting data

Getting values out of a file is the cheap part. The value is in what happens when they do not add up.

What can go in

PDF, whether it carries real text or is a picture of a document. Word and Excel with the header on row four. CSV in somebody else’s encoding. XML and JSON. A photo taken at an angle in a car. Structured e-invoices, which are the easy case, are one more shape arriving.

However the files already move: a mailbox, a folder, a scanner, a portal, an API.

Every value carries where it came from

Each field says whether it was read from the document, looked up in one of your systems, calculated, or left for a person. A value that was looked up names the key it was matched on. That is what makes a wrong number findable a year later.

Checks

Which checks run is agreed in the plan before the job goes live. They compare against your data, not against the document itself:

• The arithmetic. Items against the total, net and tax against the sum, with a tolerance you set.
• The identity. Matched by registration number to a record you already have, never by name.
• The expectation. An order it came against, and no earlier copy of the same document.

Nothing is half written

When a check fails the file is held with the reason next to it, and nothing is written, not even the fields that were fine. A partially written record is worse than none.

Measured first

A job that writes into your systems is scored on a batch of your own files before it can be switched on. See Measured before it goes live.