Extract Data from Invoices to Avoid Fraud using PDF.co Document Parser
In this article, you will see how PDF.co Document Parser can be used to extract useful information from text invoices. For example, you can extract data from PDF forms, statements, invoices, and further official documentation.
You will also find out how to easily prevent invoice fraud by swiftly checking the account information from incoming invoices.
An average company can lose thousands of dollars just on 1 invoice scam case. That’s why an invoice fraud checker is so critical.
Why Use PDF.co Document Parser?
With PDF.co Document Parser API, you don’t need coding to read content from an invoice. All you have to do is upload the PDF invoice that you want to read data from and PDF.co will extract all the information from the invoice. You can also extract contents from multiple invoices at once and download the data from invoices in the form of a CSV file. So, let’s begin without any ado.
How to Extract Data from Invoices
Let’s first see how PDF.co Document Parser can be used to extract data from invoices.
The following PDF invoice is used as a sample in this article:
To read the content of this invoice, go to https://app.pdf.co/document-parser.
Open the PDF.co Document Parser. To process an invoice stored on your computer, click Choose File, locate the invoice, and open it. You can also use From URL when the source document is available through a direct, publicly accessible URL.
In this tutorial, we will be uploading a PDF invoice from our local drive. Hence, click the “Choose file” button and locate the directory where your PDF invoice is located, and simply double-click the file. PDF.co Document parser will start reading the contents of your file. The Document Parser can read images as well as PDF files.
After the file contents are parsed by PDF.co Document Parser, you should see the file contents in the extracted results table as shown below:
In the above image, you can see the company name, invoice id, date issued, due date, bank account, and total amount. This is how you read data from a single invoice and validate the data against fraud.
How to Read Data from Multiple Invoices
With PDF.co Document Parser, you can simultaneously extract information from multiple invoices. Let’s see an example. This time we will simultaneously read text from two invoices: one that you saw in the previous section and the other invoice that looks like this:
The process remains the same, you have to go to https://app.pdf.co/document-parser and click the “Choose file” button (to import data from the local file system).
Next, select multiple invoices by holding Shift + Click on the files you want to choose.
Next, click the “Open” button from the file open dialogue box. PDF.co document parser will start extracting the contents from both PDF invoices. Once the data is extracted, you should see the extracted results in the form of a table as shown below:
Here you can see that the company name, issue, due date, bank account, and total amounts from both invoices are displayed. You can also download the content in the form of a CSV file by clicking the “Export to CSV’ link at the bottom left of the page.
How to Check Bank-Account Information with the PDF.co API
You can use the PDF.co text-search API to check whether an extracted bank-account number appears in a trusted reference document.
Upload or provide a URL for the reference PDF, then submit the account number as the search text. The API returns information about whether and where the text was found.
For the current endpoint and request parameters, see the PDF.co Find Text API documentation.
Finding an account number in a reference document can support an invoice-validation workflow, but it does not by itself prove that an invoice is legitimate. Combine this check with other controls, such as validating the supplier, payment details, invoice number, and purchase authorization.
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