Intelligent document processing (IDP)

Many business processes start with a document: a supplier invoice, a purchase order, a signed form, a receipt, a bank statement, a copy of an ID. Intelligent document processing turns those into structured data without someone re-typing them. It goes further than optical character recognition (OCR), which converts an image of text into machine-readable text but doesn't know what the text means.

How it works

1. Capture: documents arrive by email, upload, scan or phone photo.
2. Classify: the system recognizes what each document is, such as an invoice, a contract or a delivery note.
3. Extract: it pulls out the fields that matter, such as supplier, date, line items and totals, using OCR together with machine learning or a large language model.
4. Validate: it checks the data against rules and other records. Do the line items add up to the total? Does the order number exist? Has this invoice been entered before?
5. Review: anything uncertain or out of line goes to a person, with the document and the questionable field side by side.
6. Deliver: approved data goes to the accounting system, CRM or ERP, usually through an API.

Why validation matters

AI models can misread a figure or fill a gap with a plausible guess; see AI hallucination. A sound IDP setup never trusts extraction alone. It checks totals, matches records and sends low-confidence fields to review. The aim is fewer documents handled by people, not zero oversight.

IDP is often paired with robotic process automation: IDP reads the document, and a bot enters the result into a system that has no API.

How it relates to Worcia

Document processing is part of Maestro, Worcia's AI process automation: forms, emails, PDFs and scans are read by AI, checked against your rules and entered into the right system. See the purchase order entry use case and how to automate bookkeeping.