Apex Automation free tools
Every invoice checked against its own arithmetic
Pulling fields off an invoice is guessing. Every tool in this category guesses, and most of them are good at it. What none of them tell you is which invoice they got wrong. An invoice is one of the few documents that carries its own proof: the lines add up to the subtotal, and the subtotal and the tax add up to the total. This one does that arithmetic on every invoice and says which ones do not come out.
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Drop a folder's worth at once. They come back as one spreadsheet, with the line items beside the totals.
What will not work. A scan or a photograph of an invoice, which needs character recognition this tool does not do. A spreadsheet or a Word file, which is not a PDF. An invoice written entirely as one image inside a PDF. In each case nothing is guessed at: the file is listed with the reason and the rest of the batch carries on.
Four sums run on every invoice, and each one is reported whether it passed or failed, so a check that quietly stopped running cannot hide behind a clean result.
Nothing is ever corrected. Where the sums disagree, the figures are reported exactly as they were read and the difference is named. Correcting would mean writing a number into your spreadsheet that was never on the invoice, which is the one thing this tool must not do.
Here is what counting cannot catch, and we would rather say it here than let you find out. An invoice whose figures were misread in a way that still balances comes back clean. If a supplier prints two columns of amounts and we read the wrong one throughout, the lines will add up to the subtotal we also read wrongly, and the arithmetic will agree with itself. The check proves the figures are consistent. It cannot show which invoice was consistent about the wrong thing. That is why the amounts that landed in no column at all are listed too: between the two, very little gets past.
The totals on an invoice are labelled. The table above them is not: it is a grid held together by where things sit on the page. That is why the free tools in this category return the header fields and the total and nothing in between, and why the paid ones put the line items behind a subscription.
Where an invoice prints table headings, they are read and the columns are learned from them, in whichever language they are written in. Where it prints none, the table is found from the shape instead: a run of lines that each end in an amount, with text to the left of it. A description that wraps onto a second and third line stays with the row it belongs to rather than becoming two more rows.
Numbers are measured by their right edge and text by its left, because that is how they are aligned on every invoice anybody prints. Measuring both by the left edge puts 1,234.56 and 9.99 in different columns, which is how a table comes apart.
Every paid tool in this category sells accuracy, and not one of their feature pages mentions a second language or a second currency. An invoice is not an English document. It says Rechnungsnummer, or Numero de facture, or 請求書番号, and it says it wherever the supplier's template happens to put it.
So the labels come first and the positions second. Over four hundred label spellings across more than twenty languages, each matched after accents are stripped and punctuation is folded, so one entry covers N° de facture, No. de Facture and Nº DE FACTURA. A label found anywhere on the page claims the value beside it, whatever the layout.
A tax registration number is not just a string. Most of them carry a check digit, which means the number either could exist or definitely could not. Reading one is useful. Saying whether it is well formed is something no other tool in this category does.
A UK VAT number has the 97 check HMRC uses. An Indian GSTIN has a check character over its fourteen. An Australian ABN has its weighted modulo 89. An IBAN has the standard 97 check. Each is run, and the answer goes into the spreadsheet in its own column beside the number.
A number is only claimed when the document also says what it is. A string that merely fits the shape, in a sentence about a delivery note, is a string that fits a shape. Shape alone is not evidence.
This is the expensive mistake in accounts payable, and the one paid tool that checks for it puts the check behind a subscription. Across the whole batch, two rules run, both deliberately conservative.
The same supplier and the same invoice number is a duplicate whatever else differs. The same supplier, the same total, and a date within three days is a likely one, and is reported as likely rather than certain, because a cleaner who invoices the same amount every week is not a duplicate.
Every figure printed on an invoice should be a line amount, a unit price, a total, a tax, or something the document explains. One that is none of those is either a field this tool did not know to look for or something it misread, and either way you should be told rather than left to notice.
So the amounts are counted, in and out. Anything written as money that ended up in no column at all is listed with the line it was found on. On a clean invoice that list is empty, and when it is not, it is usually pointing at something real.
One more thing worth saying plainly, because an invoice carries your supplier's bank details and your own purchase history. Nothing here is uploaded. We put no upload endpoint in the page, and you do not have to believe that: open your browser's Network tab while you use it, or pull the plug on your connection after the page has loaded and carry on working. It keeps going, because there is nothing on the other end.
Numbers somebody typed on a page are worth nothing, so each of these is produced by a test file you could run yourself, and the figures below are checked against the code by another test.
Two of them are worth describing. Every test is deliberately broken before it is trusted: the fix is reverted, the suite is run, and a test that still passes is not a test. And a sweep of sixteen deliberate faults is run over the engine, each one reverted in turn, because a fault that nothing notices is a place where the tests have no opinion.
Said plainly, because finding out later is worse.
As many as your machine will hold. The free tools in this category stop at one invoice at a time, or twenty pages a month, because they are front ends to a paid service and that is where the free tier ends. The work here happens in your own browser, so there is no tier to run out of.
Both. The line items are the part most free tools skip, because the totals are labelled and the table is not. The table is found from its headings where the invoice prints them, in whatever language, and from the alignment of the amounts where it prints none.
An invoice carries its own proof. The lines should add up to the subtotal, and the subtotal plus the tax should be the total. Both sums run on every invoice, along with the tax against the rates on the lines and the quantity times the price on each line. An invoice whose sums do not come out is marked, with the difference named, rather than exported as though it were fine.
No. We put no upload endpoint in the page. Open your browser's Network tab while you use it, or go offline after the page has loaded and carry on working. This matters more here than for most tools, because an invoice carries your supplier's bank details and your own purchase history.
A scan is a photograph, and reading one needs character recognition, which this tool does not do. A scanned file is named as a scan rather than guessed at, and the rest of your batch carries on without it.
It is recognised as one, and every figure comes back negative, including the line amounts. A credit note read as an invoice is how a month of figures comes out wrong by twice the credit. Proformas and quotations are recognised too, and marked, because they are not money owed.
They come back as several invoices. A new one is declared when a page carries its own invoice number and that number is not the one before it, so a two page invoice stays one invoice and two one page invoices become two.
Yes. Every cell in the table is editable, and the sums run again as you type, so a correction that breaks the arithmetic is caught exactly as the tool's own mistakes are. Editing is not a way around the check.
If an invoice comes out wrong, that is the most useful thing you can send us, and one line is enough. You do not need to send the invoice itself. toolssupport@apexautomationteam.com