Importing invoices when there's no scanner involved
Most new AP customers ask about scanners. Most existing AP customers don't use them. Here are the three ingestion paths that actually move invoices into RQ CloudOCR in the field, and the trade-offs we walk through on every implementation call.
Email intake
A dedicated AP mailbox forwards into RQ CloudOCR. Supplier sends a PDF; OCR reads it; the document lands in the coder queue with header data populated. Lowest setup cost, highest variance in document quality, and the source of most exceptions early on. Worth it for fast time-to-value.
Supplier portal
Suppliers log in and submit invoices against open POs. Cleanest data, lowest exception rate, highest change-management cost. Works best when your top 20 suppliers account for 80% of volume.
EDI / structured drop
For high-volume trading partners. No OCR involved, structured data lands directly in the coding queue. Setup is per-supplier and per-format; payoff is near-zero exceptions on those lanes.
How we usually phase it
Email intake on day one, supplier portal for your top 20 within the first quarter, EDI for the handful of trading partners where it pays for itself. Most exception queues shrink by half between week two and month three on that path.