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    All five industries

    Restaurant group

    Fennick & Thorlow Restaurant Group

    San Francisco, CA

    The invoice is the delivery ticket, signed at the back door, with short shipments written on it in pencil.

    documents sent
    110documents sent
    vendors
    12vendors
    document layouts
    10document layouts
    carry a deliberate trap
    31carry a deliberate trap

    The setup

    An invented San Francisco business, built down to the chart of accounts

    The company and its vendors are made up. It still has its own QuickBooks company, its own local sales tax, and documents written the way this trade writes them.

    Its own QuickBooks company

    75accounts in a chart
    built for this trade
    Local sales tax on vendor documents
    8.625%
    Submission
    Automatic
    Inbox
    Its own email address, connected to DocStreamAI

    Nobody approved or corrected anything along the way. A document one of DocStreamAI's checks held for review stayed held, so every result is exactly what was read.

    Who sends the paperwork

    12 vendors in 10 trades, writing on 10 different layouts.

    From

    Broadline food distributors

    To: Fennick & Thorlow Restaurant Group

    From

    Produce

    To: Fennick & Thorlow Restaurant Group

    From

    Protein & seafood

    To: Fennick & Thorlow Restaurant Group

    From

    Dairy

    To: Fennick & Thorlow Restaurant Group

    From

    Beverage & alcohol

    To: Fennick & Thorlow Restaurant Group

    From

    Paper & disposables

    To: Fennick & Thorlow Restaurant Group

    From

    Linen service

    To: Fennick & Thorlow Restaurant Group

    From

    Grease & hood cleaning

    To: Fennick & Thorlow Restaurant Group

    From

    Pest control

    To: Fennick & Thorlow Restaurant Group

    From

    POS software

    To: Fennick & Thorlow Restaurant Group

    The pile

    Everything that arrived, one sheet per document

    55

    Invoices

    40

    Receipts

    10

    Credit memos

    5

    Vendor statements

    110 documents in 109 PDF files. The 5 vendor statements list invoices that were also sent, so the right number of new bills from them is zero.

    43% arrived as paper

    47 of 110 were scanned, photographed, faxed or photocopied. 63 were clean files.

    Scans
    32
    Phone photos
    8
    Faxes
    3
    Photocopies
    4

    The traps

    Where this paperwork goes wrong

    The invoice is the delivery ticket: bill, packing slip and receiving record in one document, signed at the back door. Broadline distributors deliver several times a week, protein is billed at actual shipped weight instead of by the case, and drivers write short-ships onto the printed page in pencil.

    COPY
    Delivery ticket · broadline
    Romaine hearts 24 ct 3 CS123.75
    short 1 cs
    Heavy cream, qt 1258.80
    Invoice total486.10
    -41.25

    The driver wrote on it

    A case was short. The printed total no longer matches what is owed, and only the pencil says so.

    Invoice · protein and seafood
    Ribeye, choice 2 CS38.62 LB
    @ 11.89 / LB
    Extension459.19

    Billed by the pound that shipped

    Protein is invoiced at actual weight, so the case count and the price never multiply to the line.

    Two arrivals
    Invoice 208841 · signed paper612.44
    Invoice 208841 · emailed PDF612.44

    The same invoice, twice

    Paper from the driver at the door, then the same invoice again as a PDF the next morning.

    Invoice · beverage
    Rewards, purchases YTD48,215.60
    Invoice total612.44

    A loyalty block in the money column

    Year to date purchases sit beside the invoice total and are eighty times larger.

    Excerpts drawn in the shape of this industry's documents, with invented names. The full set carries 18 kinds of difficulty across all five businesses. See every one

    The results

    How DocStreamAI handled this inbox

    Measured in two places. Inside DocStreamAI: what was read, what kind of document it is, whether it made it from the email, which vendor it belongs to and where it was categorized, each checked against the answer key written for every document. Then in QuickBooks: whether the record that landed matches.

    54 text PDFs from Fennick & Thorlow Restaurant Group, the kind billing software makes. 53 reached extraction and were scored against their answer keys.

    96.4%664 of 689

    Extraction

    Values read correctly off the page, every field pooled.

    94.3%50 of 53

    Every key field right*

    Documents with every key field correct at once.

    98.1%52 of 53

    Detection

    Invoice, receipt or credit memo, identified correctly.

    98.1%53 of 54

    Intake

    Documents that made it from the email to a record DocStreamAI read.

    Vendor statements kept out: 3 of 3

    100.0%39 of 39

    Vendor

    Read after the vendor was in QuickBooks, and found it. How this is counted is on the summary page.

    Not measured yet

    Categorization

    Expense account matches the account the chart intends.

    * Line descriptions, quantities and unit prices count as lower severity and are left out of this figure. QuickBooks records each line by its amount, so a wrong quantity or unit price does not change what lands in the books. Counting them too: 81.1% (43 of 53).

    Extraction, field by field

    Vendor name

    100.0%

    53 of 53 read correctly

    Document number

    100.0%

    53 of 53 read correctly

    Document date

    100.0%

    53 of 53 read correctly

    Due date

    98.1%

    52 of 53 read correctly

    Currency

    100.0%

    53 of 53 read correctly

    Subtotal

    96.2%

    51 of 53 read correctly

    Tax

    96.2%

    51 of 53 read correctly

    Total

    96.2%

    51 of 53 read correctly

    Number of lines

    96.2%

    51 of 53 read correctly

    Line descriptionsLower severity

    86.8%

    46 of 53 read correctly

    Line quantitiesLower severity

    92.5%

    49 of 53 read correctly

    Unit pricesLower severity

    94.3%

    50 of 53 read correctly

    Line amounts

    96.2%

    51 of 53 read correctly

    Scanned PDFs

    Scans, phone photos and faxes, on their own

    Reported apart from text PDFs because one part of handling them is still being built.

    43 scanned PDFs sent: office scans, phone photos, faxes and photocopies saved as PDF. 35 reached extraction and were scored.

    Once a scan is read

    • 98.2%447 of 455

      Fields read correctly

    • 91.4%32 of 35

      Every key field right*

    • 100.0%35 of 35

      Type detected

    Text PDFs, for comparison: 96.4% of fields read correctly, and every key field right* on 94.3% of documents.

    Getting a scan to that point

    The only attachment on its email

    35 of 35

    Picked up and read every time.

    Sent with other attachments

    0 of 8

    Not picked up yet. The other attachments on the same email were read as normal.

    Scanned vendor statements kept out

    0 of 2

    Not recognised as statements yet. 2 of the 2 were posted as bills.

    Planned for a future update: picking up scanned PDFs that arrive alongside other attachments, and recognising a scanned vendor statement for what it is.

    * Line descriptions, quantities and unit prices count as lower severity and are left out of this figure. QuickBooks records each line by its amount, so a wrong quantity or unit price does not change what lands in the books. Counting them too: 82.9% (29 of 35).

    In QuickBooks

    What landed in the books

    The record in QuickBooks matches the document and what DocStreamAI read, per record type.

    • Not measured yet

      Bills

      Created from invoices.

      Not measured in this run.

    • Not measured yet

      Vendor credits

      Created from credit memos.

      Not measured in this run.

    • Not measured yet

      Expenses

      Created from receipts.

      Waiting on the card match. A receipt posts once its payment card is matched to an account in QuickBooks, and that is not set up in these companies yet.

    The other four businesses

    Summary of all five

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    E-commerce & import

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