Purchase orders with varying formats — any tips?

[anna_kowalski]

I manage procurement for a manufacturing company and we receive purchase orders from about 50 different suppliers. As you can imagine, every supplier has their own PO format.

I need to extract the same core data from each:

• PO number
• Line items (part number, description, quantity, unit price)
• Total amount
• Delivery date
• Supplier info

I’ve created about 10 templates so far for our highest-volume suppliers, but I can’t realistically create templates for all 50+.

Questions:

1. Is there a ‘generic PO’ template approach that works reasonably well across formats?
2. For line items/tables, what’s the best way to handle different table structures?
3. Anyone automated the process of matching incoming POs to the right template?

[carlos_mendez]

We do something similar with vendor invoices. I created one ‘catch-all’ template with very descriptive field names and it handles maybe 70% of formats decently. For the other 30%, specific templates. It’s not perfect but manageable.

[tanya_berg]

For the table extraction part — I’ve found that Qomplement handles tables pretty well as long as there are clear borders or consistent spacing. The tricky ones are when suppliers use free-form layouts without proper table structure.