Extracting line items from recurring PDF Invoices or Purchase Orders is easy with Docparser. Below are the steps you need to take to extract line items.
Please note: Our table extraction tool is a 'location based'. This means that you need to train one Document Parser for each invoice or purchase order layout you want to parse. Docparser is not capable of extracting line-items from an unknown number of invoice layouts. If you however are only after generic data such as totals, dates and invoice numbers, you can create a single documents parser for all your layouts.
1) Create a new Line-Item parsing rule
Navigate to "Parsing Rules", click on "Add Parsing Rule" and choose "Line Items" when prompted what type of data you want to extract. The Line Item presets is visible when you chose 'Invoices' or 'Purchase Orders' as the document type when creating your Document Parser.
2) Define the column borders
The first step is to visually define where the table is located inside your document.
- Move the existing column separators so that they fit the column borders of your table
- Add as many column separators as needed with the "+" buttons to the left and to the right of the screen
- You can also define the area where the table is located by keeping your mouse pointer clicked while moving your mouse (optional). A defined table with column separators is shown below:
3) Refine parsed results
The results of the table extraction will be visible after clicking on 'Confirm Selection' in the bottom right. The previous step of visually defining the table will give you a result which you likely want to refine somewhat.
You can e.g. filter out unwanted rows, format dates, etc. Refining parsing results is done by chaining up multiple filters on the right side. A click on 'Add Table Filter' will reveal a menu with various options. Please see the linked articles below for more details on the various table row filters.
We hope this article helped you getting started with getting table data from invoices and purchase orders. If you want a helping hand with the setup, please don't hesitate to reach out to us. We also published an article about Invoice OCR Scanning Software on our blog. We hope it's helpful.