Look beyond reading the document
An invoice or request form may need to be read, checked against a business record, approved and posted. Extracting text is only one stage. A useful solution makes the handoffs and validation visible.
Consider an illustrative invoice intake process: the system proposes document fields, checks them against the supplier and order, and presents exceptions to a reviewer before any financial posting.
- 01Receive and extract
Read the document and extract relevant fields.
- 02Validate
Check required values and business rules.
- 03Review exceptions
A person checks uncertain or consequential results.
- 04Update the system
Run an authorised action and record its outcome.
Illustrative design. Confirm sources, access, integrations and review rules for your process.
Choose representative samples
Gather examples across suppliers, formats, scans and languages that occur in the intended process. Include difficult images, missing fields, multiple pages and unfamiliar layouts. Confirm permission to use the samples.
Azure Document Intelligence offers document extraction capabilities. Choosing a model requires evaluating it on your own documents and checking the formats and features it supports.
Validate the proposed fields
Extraction confidence can help identify candidates for review, but it is not a business approval. Check totals, identifiers, required fields and record matches using explicit rules. Review an uncertain supplier or an unmatched order.
Define the review threshold using your evaluation results and the consequence of an error. Different fields may need different rules.
Make exceptions easy to resolve
Show the original document beside proposed fields. Let the reviewer correct values and record the reason. Keep ownership visible for unreadable documents, missing information and disputes.
Use a stable document identifier to prevent duplicate processing. Preserve the original file and the verified outcome according to your retention policy.
Connect the approved result
Only after validation and any required approval should a workflow create or update the business record. Record the result and make downstream failures visible.
Evaluate field accuracy, review time, duplicate handling and complete processing success. Start with one document type and one target system before expanding the intake.
Further reading
Official documentation supporting the technology references. The implementation recommendations and scenarios are sbPowerDev’s editorial guidance.
