August 23, 2026

How to digitize delivery notes and invoices without templates or classic OCR

Every supplier invoices differently: some send a PDF, others a phone photo of the delivery note, and some still use pen and paper. If your accounting firm or business processes those documents by hand, every new format means more time spent copying numbers into Excel. Here's what changes when you use AI instead of classic OCR.

Why traditional OCR falls short

Classic OCR (optical character recognition) turns an image into text, but it doesn't understand what that text means. To know which number is the total and which is the tax, most tools need a fixed template per supplier: exact coordinates for where each field sits on the page. As soon as a supplier changes their invoice layout, moves a field, or sends a slightly crooked photo, the template breaks and someone has to fix it by hand.

What changes with multimodal AI

A vision-capable AI model doesn't look for data at a fixed coordinate — it reads the document the way a person would. It recognizes that a number next to the word 'TOTAL' is the final amount, even if that word sits in a different corner on every invoice, and it works just as well with a scanned PDF, a phone photo, or even a handwritten note. There's no template to build or maintain per supplier.

How to do it step by step

1. Upload the document (PDF or photo) exactly as you received it — no special scanning or cropping needed. 2. The AI identifies the issuer, date, document number, line items and totals. 3. You review the extracted data before using it. 4. You download an Excel file ready to import into your ERP or accounting software.

Try it with your own documents

Sumafact does exactly this: upload an invoice or delivery note and download the data as Excel in seconds, no templates needed. The free plan includes 15 documents a month.

Start for free