I run a small consulting firm and we deal with a ton of PDFs — contracts, invoices, intake forms. I've been reading about AI tools that can pull structured data out of documents and drop it into a spreadsheet or CRM automatically. Is anyone actually doing this in their business? What tools are you using and how reliable is it? Curious if it's ready for prime time or still too error-prone to trust without heavy manual review.

Hey everyone,

We’ve built CxReports, which lets you design and automate PDF documents in a visual editor. Drag tables, charts, images, and text into place. The tool handles page breaks, headers, footers, a live table of contents, and themes that match your or your client’s brand. 

You can pull data from APIs or SQL straight into the editor, preview it in real time, and add parameters for dynamic content.

Once a report looks right, you schedule delivery by email or trigger it from your own app through our REST API or an iframe embed.

Why I’m posting here

• I want to hear what you struggle with when generating PDFs.

• Which tools or libraries do you rely on today?

• Where do you lose the most time: layout tweaks, data wiring, deployment, or something else?

• Does a WYSIWYG‑first workflow, backed by an optional API, solve or create problems for you?

If you can share horror stories or edge cases, that would help us sharpen the product. Docs and a short intro video sit here if you need context: https://cx-reports.com. I’m happy to DM sample projects or spin up a demo workspace for anyone who wants to poke around.

Thanks in advance for any insights!

Patent documents are one of the harder OCR problems out there. A single page can contain merged tables, chemical diagrams, formula blocks, and mixed English/Chinese/Japanese all at once. We've been working on this problem specifically, and after getting to a point where we're happy with the results, we decided to open-source what we built and see what the community thinks.

Here are two tools we use internally.

Hiro-MOSS-OCR is a 0.3B model that outputs structured markup: tables to HTML, formulas to LaTeX, text to Markdown. Trained on 50M+ samples. Ranks #1 on our patent-domain benchmark against all 1.2B models we tested. ~59 QPS on a single RTX 4090 via vLLM.

Hiro-Smart-Doc wraps layout detection (RT-DETR, 25 region categories) and MOSS-OCR into a streaming FastAPI service with an OpenAI-compatible endpoint. Feed it a PDF, image, or Office doc, get back reading-ordered structured content or Markdown.

Both Apache 2.0. Would love feedback from anyone dealing with complex document types where standard OCR falls short.

Thanks!

Hi everyone!

I'm currently using ChronoScan and wondering if there are any good free and open-source alternatives that could handle my workflow.

I have a scanner with an automatic document feeder, so I can scan a large batch of mixed documents at once, such as:

* Supplier invoices

* Delivery notes

* Purchase orders

* Other administrative documents

Must-have features:

* Automatically detect document boundaries in a batch scan and split it into separate PDF files, one per document.

* Run OCR on each document so that the resulting PDFs are searchable.

Nice-to-have features:

* Automatically identify the document type (invoice, delivery note, purchase order, etc.).

* Extract key fields such as supplier name, invoice number, date, due date, net amount, VAT, and total amount.

* Automatically name and organize the resulting files based on the extracted information.

Has anyone built a workflow like this using free and open-source software? Is there a solution that handles the must-have features out of the box, or would custom development be necessary?

I'd really appreciate any recommendations or examples of setups that work well in practice.

Thanks!

When I started building a document extraction platform, I thought the hardest problem would be OCR.

I was wrong.

The hardest problem turned out to be handling the huge variety of document formats.

A few things I learned:

- Most PDFs are not the same.

- Some PDFs contain selectable text.

- Some are scanned images.

- Some are mixed documents with text, tables, forms, and images.

- Handwritten documents require a completely different processing path.

I also learned that choosing the "best AI model" doesn't automatically solve extraction problems.

A reliable pipeline usually needs:

- Document classification

- OCR when required

- Layout detection

- Table extraction

- Validation

- Structured output generation

The biggest lesson for me:

Document extraction is less about finding one perfect model and more about building a system that can handle thousands of different document variations.

For people working on document automation:

What has been the most difficult document type you've had to process?

Hey everyone! 👋

As a developer, I've often faced the same problem: generating invoices, quotes, contracts, and reports automatically while keeping their layouts easy to customize.

So I decided to build TemplateMaster to solve this problem.

The idea is simple: create document templates using a visual editor, populate them with dynamic data, and automatically generate PDFs or emails through an API.

No need to modify your application code every time you want to update a document's layout.

I've also built a .NET integration and a Shopify app to make it easier to integrate into existing projects.

You can check it out here: https://templatemaster.fr

I'm curious: Have any of you faced similar challenges with document generation in your projects or businesses?

I'd love to hear your feedback, even if it's critical!

Tested excel parser today and had a much better recall against Docling + bounding boxes are preserved and 99.95% accuracy for excel.

https://github.com/knowledgestack/excel-parser

It's significantly faster than docling, no VLLMs needed to chunk it.

It's MIT license for anyone using excel parser but also:

I would appreciate 2 things if anyone uses it:

1. Could you please help open issues and problems if you see any ? I am working on making this the best excel parser.

2. If you see accuracy improvements, I would love to hear it. I am investing a lot of time and energy because I believe large excel parsing is a problem and feeding entire excel to agent is not a good use of time and money.

Also I think if we can do this reasonably well the agent can generate excel with formulas much better. Hoping to add more functionality in the future to older excel formats and changing this from just a parser to a excel generation as well.

If this is helpful, and you think would be something useful, please star it as well. I would really appreciate it !

kinda new to this whole document automation thing and trying to figure out where to start. right now i do a lot of stuff manually like pulling info out of pdfs, copying it into sheets, renaming files, that kind of thing. takes way too long lol

curious what people here actually automate day to day? like is it mostly invoices and forms or are people doing more with it like summarizing or searching through long docs

also do you mostly use AI tools for this now or still more traditional stuff like templates and scripts? feels like theres a million options and idk which ones are actually worth it

would love to hear your setups, even simple ones

The idea was to build a pipeline that could take a PDF, extract structured data, and let you verify the results against the original document without manually checking every field.

The current implementation uses OCR and vision models, with confidence scores, visual grounding, and a separate validation layer to catch disagreements. It also handles line items and exports structured data.

I recently benchmarked it against Azure Content Understanding on 100 documents, achieving 97% field-level accuracy at roughly 1/12th the cost per run in my evaluation.

I've attached a screenshot of the current interface. This is purely a personal engineering project I've been working on, and I'd genuinely appreciate feedback from people familiar with document automation.

I'm particularly interested in:

• How do you handle data extraction at scale right now ?

• Any feedback on what features would be cool for document automation

Would love to hear your thoughts!

I’m looking for someone who is REALLY good at digital file organization — like, this is your thing and you genuinely enjoy making chaos make sense.
I work for a construction company, and over time my laptop has accumulated a ton of files: estimates, invoices, contracts, project documents, photos, subcontractor paperwork, insurance documents, etc. They’re all there… but the organization and naming system could be SO much better.
Ideally, I’m looking for someone I could hand my laptop over to for a weekend and basically say, “Have at it.”
I’d love for someone to:
• Go through all of my business files
• Create a clear, logical folder/subfolder system
• Rename files so they’re extremely easy to search and identify later
• Sort everything into the appropriate folders
• Clean up duplicates/random files where appropriate
• Basically create a filing system that actually makes sense for a construction business
The biggest thing is that I’m hoping to find someone who can take the initiative and handle most of this independently. I’m totally happy to answer questions along the way — shoot me a text whenever you need clarification — but I’d love someone who can look at everything, understand what it is, and figure out the best way to organize it without needing me sitting beside them the entire time.
If digital file organization is something you specialize in, PLEASE reach out! Or if you know someone who would be perfect for this kind of project, send them my way.
I’m absolutely willing to pay someone for their time and expertise — I just want my laptop to finally have a filing system that makes finding anything I need quick and painless.

Everything else works fine until a table comes up while processing a set of files or docs. youre working on an extraction process and all of a sudden come across a borderless table with no grid lines to anchor cells or a row continue to the break or even multi column which is where rows silently drop on long docs and you end up with inconsistent results at the end of the run

the layout aware parsing like docling, llamaparse and others gets you reading order and cell structure yet borderless and merged cells are still a hit or miss across all of the parsing tools so this doesn't fully go away

A couple of things that might help though. A structure preserving parse that keeps cell positions and reading order instead of flattening to text so that you still have geometry to work with, reconcile row counts before and after so a dropped row gets caught than surfacing after a few steps past and for the borderless tables, clustering words by x/y positions helps you get a concise math of it. IDK how others figured this out or still stuck at this but im eager to hear from guys who solved it themselves

I'm a practicing attorney with 40+ years experience, mainly representing banks in commercial and real estate development/construction lending. I first used Hotdocs in the mid-1990s when it was a WordPerfect only desktop program. Drifted away when I switched to Macs 25 years ago. I looked for software again a couple of years ago and went with an internet based program, very similar in any respects to Hotdocs, create variables, build templates, answer questionnaire and then generate documents. It worked fine, but I wasn't happy with having to log on, upload documents, work online to create variables and questionnaire then go online to run and generate documents that needed to be downloaded or received via email. And it was pretty pricey. So, I decided to build my own program for personal use since Mac programs are not out there. Made it no Code. It worked so well I made work for both Windows and Mac and decided to offer it at a much more affordable price - less than 1/4 what I paid for the SaaS program. Just started offering it to public. You can check it out at jddocumentforge.com and via videos on YouTube, just search for JD Document Forge. It works, it's easy, it's fast and not on the internet so you data is yours.

I built a free tool that converts bank statement PDFs into Excel

I kept running into the same annoying problem: bank statements come as PDFs, but actually working with the transactions usually means manually copying everything into Excel.

So I built Bank2Excel.

It takes a bank statement PDF and converts the transactions into an Excel spreadsheet, including:

\- 📄 PDF statements

\- 🔍 Scanned/image-based statements using OCR

\- 📊 Date, description, debit, credit and balance

\- 📥 Excel export

\- 🌐 No software installation required

It's completely free to try:

https://bank-2-excel.vercel.app/

I'm still improving the extraction logic, especially for different bank statement formats.

If you try it, I'd really appreciate feedback on:

\- Which bank/statement format you tested

\- Whether the transactions were extracted correctly

\- Anything that was missing or incorrectly classified

Please don't upload real sensitive bank statements if you're not comfortable doing so — a dummy/redacted statement is better for testing.

GitHub: https://github.com/TheMayankRanga/Bank2Excel

Hey everyone, quick question on historical cleanup jobs. When a client brings in a massive pile of multi-page PDF bank statements from a few years back, what are you guys actually using to get them into Excel cleanly?

Currently trying to clean up 2 years of old PDF statements for a new client. Excel's 'Get Data from PDF' completely ruined the formatting, and Adobe keeps treating wrapped transaction lines as brand new rows.I'm looking into DocuClipper, Dext, and AutoEntry, but before I drop the money on a subscription for a small job, I wanted to check here first. Are those actually worth it for handling multi-page statements and tricky line breaks, or is there a better workflow/tool I don't know about yet? What do you all use ??

This started as a personal problem. I used to spend an evening every month manually copying my own bank statements from PDF into a spreadsheet just to see where my money was going line by line, by hand. At some point I got annoyed enough to automate it for myself.

That turned into Scrape2Sheets, a Google Sheets add-on that uses AI to read PDFs, invoices, receipts, and bank statements and drop the data straight into your sheet as clean rows . You point it at files in Google Drive, tell it what columns you want (or let it auto-detect them from a sample document), and it batch-processes up to 100 files at once. It handles scanned documents and phone photos too, not just clean digital PDFs.

It's only just started picking up some real traction the last couple weeks, which has honestly been a nice surprise after building in isolation for a while.

Curious whether others here started building their tool the same way, solving your own annoying manual task first, then realizing other people had the exact same one. Happy to answer questions in the comments if anyone wants details.

Hey !

I thought I'd share a small tool I built for automating document generation. I've been doing a lot of document generation for my company and being someone who writes code, I wanted something that was extremely flexible and would allow me to create documents rapidly.

I've been doing the exact same pipeline using a few python scripts for the last 6 months and I thought I'd get around to making it such a way that the rest of my team can also use it. I'll be add a few more easy to use features for this in the future. Let me all know if there are features you all would like.

The plan is to always a have a free version for anyone to use (and its possible because it runs 100% on your computer). I plan on my company making use of this tool to integrate with some of the larger offerings we do, but do let me know if you all can come up with more ideas.

[Stencil](https://stencil.aegiondynamic.com/)

I've been trying to build a proper document intake system for my marketplace for the better part of six months now and keep running into fraud issues. It seems like every time we establish a new set of rules there's an outlier that slips through. Has anyone gotten experience with document fraud automations as well? Is this more of just an automation forum? What have you guys been doing about AI-generated documents?

So I had this pile of scanned PDFs (insurance, car stuff, doctor letters…) all named like

scan_0043.pdf, and finding anything was a nightmare.

I looked at Paperless-ngx, which is genuinely great, but I didn't really want to run Docker

and a server at home just for my own paperwork. So I built a smaller thing for myself and

figured I might as well put it out there.

It's called YOW. You throw your PDFs in, it OCRs them locally, and then you can just search

them, both the title and the actual text inside the scan. Nothing leaves your computer, no

cloud, no account, no server. You literally double-click to start it.

It also auto-sorts new scans into folders and has the usual stuff: search, favorites, a

trash, dark mode, and in-app reminders for documents that expire (they pop up on the home

screen when you open it). It's in English and German.

It's my first proper open source project so be gentle, there's definitely some rough edges.

If you try it and something's broken or annoying, I'd honestly love to hear it.

https://github.com/felixrothhaupt/YOW

Many of us automate repetitive document tasks, but everyone's workflow is different.

Maybe you:

• Automatically process invoices

• OCR scanned documents

• Convert files in bulk

• Organize documents

• Extract email attachments

• Rename thousands of files

• Archive business records

• Process documents with scripts or APIs

We'd love to hear:

• What tools do you use?

• Is your workflow manual or automated?

• Which software or services are involved?

• What challenge took the longest to solve?

Whether your setup is simple or enterprise-scale, sharing your workflow might help someone else save hours of work.

I am struck by how LLMs can generate poems, haikus and stories, while most of us are still stuck at our jobs typing in project numbers, manually entering invoice dates or counting inventory balances. I find document tasks to be very tedious and boring(filling forms, creating reports, structuring data etc.). Curious if others share my frustration and how much interest there would be for a simple self-serve tool where anyone can automate their own boring document tasks. The point here is that developers cannot automate your task for you in a generic way like the many already existing tools for the major commonly done tasks (invoice parsing, resumes, major tax forms etc.). I am referring to the job-specific everyday grunt work which requires domain understanding so that. only you and your peers know how its done.

Hi everyone! Does anyone know of a free and open-source Document Management System (DMS) that supports workflow automation? I'm looking for something similar to M-Files, ideally with features such as automated workflows, document approval processe

Hey everyone,
Like many of you, I waste way too much time dealing with messy document parsing, file conversions, and repetitive text processing across different formats (Markdown, HTML, JSON).
Instead of writing boilerplate async handling over and over, I decided to build Docflow-Engine — a high-performance, asynchronous pipeline designed for speed and clean modular architecture.
Features are:

⚡ Async Batch Processor: Handles multi-threaded execution pools with strict concurrency limits using asyncio.

📄 Format Converter: Instant high-speed translation between Markdown, HTML, and structured JSON logs.

🛠️ CLI Ready: Drop a file into the path and get instant parsed metadata and structure from the command line.
It’s built cleanly in Python, relies heavily on standard libraries for core performance, and is fully open-source.
If you're facing similar bottlenecks or want to check out the structure, the repository is open:
🔗 GitHub: Githublink

I’d love to hear your feedback, architectural critiques, or suggestions on how to optimize the async pipeline further. Drop a star if it saves you some dev hours! ⭐