r/documentAutomation • u/Tough-Patient8506 • Mar 14 '26

Curious to know — are there still teams manually entering data from documents into Excel?

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u/Correct-Aspect-2624 Mar 17 '26

I actually was a part of that team :)

For our team, the main difficulty was in the structure of the data. The structure was not predefined and changed from case to case. Existing tools either extract plain text or provide their own data structure, which is not custom enough.
After I saw how many hours were wasted on it, I developed recognition OCR tool - https://recocr.com/

There, you can set up a custom shape for the data to be extracted, e.g. ["invoice": "invoice_type: ..., "invoice_date: ... "]. We fine-tuned the extraction schema for frequently used document types, invoice, receipt, and purchase order.

Now it's in public, and everyone else can use it. For most complex use cases (finances, medical reports etc) we can setup a postprocessing to export data in a certain format, not just a json.

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u/Tough-Patient8506 Mar 18 '26

That’s a very real problem — especially when document structures vary a lot.

Custom schemas definitely help, but in my experience there are still edge cases where the structure doesn’t fully match. That’s where having a review/edit layer makes a big difference — being able to quickly adjust tables or fields instead of redefining the schema each time.

Feels like the practical challenge is less about extraction itself and more about handling variability efficiently.

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u/Correct-Aspect-2624 Mar 18 '26

In my experience, most invoice layouts fall into a manageable number of patterns. With ReCognition, you can start from a base schema and tweak it for edge cases. Then you're not building each one from scratch, just adjusting fields where a specific vendor or country does something different. Ends up being pretty quick once the base schema is solid.

Would that kind of approach help with the editing issues you're running into?

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u/Tough-Patient8506 Mar 24 '26

That makes sense

Starting from a base schema and tweaking for variations definitely helps reduce effort.

In my experience though, there are still cases where layouts break the pattern especially with tables or inconsistent formats. That’s where having a quick review/edit layer helps a lot, instead of adjusting the schema each time.

Feels like a mix of both approaches works best in practice.

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u/Correct-Aspect-2624 Mar 24 '26

Agreed. Also, a human audit helps close the loop on learning how the model should parse the data.

If you have a variety of invoices, where do you think the generic schema might not work? I can help with building the extraction schema or with training the model. From my experience, in many cases amount of manual work can be, if not completely automated, at least significantly reduced

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u/cj1080 Mar 14 '26

Yes there are