Handwritten invoices, and how much checking you will actually do
You have a stack of paper. We read it, measure what still needs checking, and the build is free.
A handwritten invoice is valid where it carries the details any invoice must carry. Software can read one, and the question that decides whether it is worth doing is how much of each document a person still re-reads. That figure depends on the handwriting, so measure it on your own documents before you buy.
Fabrx builds the API. Landing it in a given system is done by partners, so the only requirement is a system that accepts an API call.
What moves, and what it becomes
Printed form filled in by hand
The common one. The layout is printed and fixed, and the quantities, the date and the signature are the parts somebody wrote in.
A payable, with the written fields read
Purchases and payables
Invoice written out in full
A pad, a blank sheet or a duplicate book. Nothing on the page is printed, so there is no fixed position for any field and no two suppliers lay it out alike.
A payable, routed for coding
Purchases and payables
Delivery note signed on site
Often the only record that a short delivery happened, and often the only copy, written on a bonnet in the rain.
A receipt against its order
Inventory
Printed invoice amended by hand
A quantity crossed out and rewritten, a price corrected, initials beside it. The page carries two values and only one of them governs.
A payable, with both values returned
Purchases and payables
Handwritten receipt or cash slip
Small, often carbon-copied and often faded. It proves a payment happened, so it carries different required fields from an invoice.
An expense, with its evidence
Expenses
Job sheet or timesheet
Hours, materials and a signature, filled in by whoever did the work. It becomes an invoice later, and the handwriting on it decides what that invoice says.
A job record, ready to bill
Projects
What happens to one document
Your documents
Photo or scan arrives. Your documents
A phone picture, a desk scanner or an emailed PDF. All three are normal.
T+0
Fabrx
Identify the document. Fabrx
A stack of paper carries delivery notes and receipts as well as invoices.
If not an invoice
Hold for review. Fabrx. Needs a person.
Your clerk sees the page, the field in question and what stopped it.
needs a person
Then it rejoins the path above.
Read the whole page. Fabrx
The written fields and the printed ones together, wherever they sit.
If a field nobody can read
Hold for review. Fabrx. Needs a person.
Your clerk sees the page, the field in question and what stopped it.
needs a person
Then it rejoins the path above.
Check what it carries. Fabrx
The required fields are present, and the figures agree with each other.
If the figures do not agree, or the page was amended by hand
Hold for review. Fabrx. Needs a person.
Your clerk sees the page, the field in question and what stopped it.
needs a person
Then it rejoins the path above.
Send the payload. Fabrx
A posting-ready record at the endpoint you nominate.
Where we hand over
The handoff is a JSON payload to an HTTPS endpoint you own, or a webhook we call on your side. We hold no credentials to your ledger.
Your accounting system
Becomes a payable. Your accounting system
Your coding rule and your approval chain run where they run today.
What we do, and what stays yours
Fabrx builds and runs
- Identifying what each document is, so a mixed stack does not need sorting first
- Reading the whole page, the written fields along with the printed ones
- Pulling the fields wherever they sit, on a pad, a printed form or a delivery note
- Returning both values when a printed figure has been amended by hand
- Holding anything nobody can read, with the page attached and the field named
- Delivering a posting-ready payload to an endpoint you nominate
- Adding fields when what you need changes
You keep
- Whose handwriting is on the page, and how legibly they write
- How the document is captured, the lighting and the resolution included
- What an amended figure is meant to mean, when the page carries two
- Your approval chain, and the decision to pay
- Your accounting system, and who is allowed to see it
- Somebody to look at the output and tell us whether it is right
When a document is wrong
A pipeline with no failure path is a diagram of a good day. These are the ones that happen.
A field nobody can read
The document stops with that field named and the page attached. It is never guessed at, and nothing partial is sent to your endpoint.
Who sees it. Your clerk, in the review queue, with the original in front of them.
- Read by someone who knows the writer
- Queried with the supplier
- Keyed by hand, the way it is done today
The page was amended by hand
A quantity crossed out and rewritten leaves two values on the page. Both are returned as separate fields. Which one governs is a decision, and that decision stays with you.
Who sees it. Your clerk, with both figures and the part of the page they sit on.
- The amendment accepted and released
- Sent back to the supplier
- Released on the printed figure, by your rule
The photograph is too dark or too small
It stops before extraction. The limit is roughly where a person holding the picture would struggle too.
Who sees it. Whoever sent it, by reply, with the page that failed.
- Photographed again and reprocessed
- The paper original scanned
It is not an invoice
A delivery note, a receipt or a compliment slip in the same stack. It is identified as something else, set aside, and we are told. Nothing reaches your endpoint.
Who sees it. Us first, then you, usually the same day.
- Added as its own document type, usually in one business day
- Confirmed as out of scope
Handwritten invoices, and the four ways to get the data out
The same stack of paper, four approaches, and what each one asks of you.
What tells you it works on your handwriting
Keying it in
Nothing to test. A person reads it, or walks over and asks the writer.
A handwriting OCR tool
A published accuracy band, measured on documents that were not written by your people.
An outsourced data entry team
A reference, and a trial period you usually pay for.
Fabrx
A figure measured on your own documents, before any money moves.
What it costs to find out
Keying it in
No new spend. The cost is hours your team is already paid for.
A handwriting OCR tool
A licence and the time to set it up, before you know it reads yours.
An outsourced data entry team
Onboarding, then a rate per document.
Fabrx
Nothing. The build is free and you pay per document once it runs.
How much of each document somebody re-reads
Keying it in
All of it, because reading it is the job.
A handwriting OCR tool
Whatever the confidence scores send back, on a threshold you set.
An outsourced data entry team
A sample, unless you check every one, which some do.
Fabrx
What your own samples showed, measured field by field.
What happens to a field nobody can read
Keying it in
The person keying it makes a judgement, or asks.
A handwriting OCR tool
Commonly a best guess with a score attached, which you have to act on.
An outsourced data entry team
A query comes back to you, at the provider's pace.
Fabrx
It stops, and is reported with the page and the field named.
When the form or the handwriting changes
Keying it in
Nobody notices. A person reads the new one the same way.
A handwriting OCR tool
A template driven tool stops matching, and you set it up again.
An outsourced data entry team
Absorbed by the provider, at the provider's pace.
Fabrx
Nothing changes. The extraction reads fields by what they are, wherever they sit on the page.
Where the data lands
Keying it in
Typed into the system you already use.
A handwriting OCR tool
Their platform, then an export or a connector into yours.
An outsourced data entry team
A file they send you, or their portal.
Fabrx
A record at an endpoint you own, inside the system you already use.
Someone has run this
They built solutions for any situation encountered along the way. For us, this type of partnership matters.
- 300+
- Field agents using it every working day
- 4,000+
- Documents processed every month
- 4 yrs
- In production, on the same workflow
Blitz runs ID documents into signed contracts, and those are printed. The figures are theirs and they are here because the pipeline above is the one they run, not because Blitz sends us handwriting.
What a pilot measures
Measured on your documents
Field-level accuracy
Every field on every sample document, scored against your correction.
How much a person re-reads
The share of fields that came back wanting a second pair of eyes.
Sample size
How many of your real documents we ran. You choose which.
Exception rate
The share that stopped for a person, and what stopped them.
Build time
Calendar time from your samples reaching us to the pipeline running.
What we ask you for
How many different people write on these documents?
Handwriting varies by writer more than by anything else, so the number of writers changes what the samples have to cover.
How long does one document take today, start to finish?
It is the only honest denominator for any claim about time saved.
How do they reach you, as paper, a photograph or a scan?
Capture quality is the half of the result that stays with you.
How many do you process in a month?
It sets the pricing band, because the rate depends on volume.
What happens now when one of them cannot be read?
It tells us what the exception path has to do on day one.
What it costs
- 01
We build it
We build the extraction, usually within one business day of receiving your sample documents.
- 02
You check it
It costs you nothing until it runs on your real documents. If the accuracy is not good enough, nothing goes into production and nothing is charged.
- 03
Then you pay
A prepaid package priced per document, valid for a calendar year. The rate depends on the document type and your monthly volume.
- No subscription
- No per-seat charge
- No setup fee at any volume
Questions about handwritten invoices
Are handwritten invoices acceptable?
Generally yes, where the document carries the information an invoice has to carry: who is selling, who is buying, what was supplied, the amounts, the tax and the date. The format matters much less than the content. Which fields are required is set where you trade, so check the rules that apply to you. If you are the one receiving it, the same test applies: where the required details are present and legible, it can be accepted and posted.
How to do a handwritten invoice?
Write the same fields a printed invoice carries, and give it a unique number so it can be found again afterwards. One thing most guides leave out is worth doing: write it so it can be read later by a machine as well as by a person. Keep the numerals clear, keep figures out of the ruled lines, and write the total once.
Are handwritten receipts valid?
Yes, on the same terms. A receipt proves a payment happened and an invoice requests one, so the two carry different required fields, and a handwritten receipt needs the ones that apply to a receipt. Legibility matters more here, because receipts are small, often carbon-copied, and often faded by the time anyone needs to read them.
What are the three types of invoices?
The phrase comes from several groupings that do not agree with each other, so there is no single correct list. The most common one splits invoices by when they are issued: proforma, interim and final. Another splits them by purpose, which gives the standard invoice, the credit note and the debit note. Which grouping is useful depends on what you are trying to decide.
Can software read handwriting on an invoice?
Yes. Intelligent character recognition has read handwriting for years, and a page that mixes printed and written fields is ordinary input. The parts it cannot read are where the work goes. Ours stops and reports those instead of returning a guess.
How much of each invoice will someone still have to check?
No published accuracy figure answers that. A number measured on somebody else's handwriting cannot predict yours, because the variation that decides it lives in the people filling the page. It also depends what the number counts. Ninety per cent of characters, of fields and of documents are three different amounts of checking. We measure it on your own documents during the build, and you see the result before you pay anything.
Related
- invoice processing
What happens to an invoice once the data is off it, for an inbox that is mostly printed.
- automatic document processing
The same pipeline, described without reference to one document type.
- how the build works
What the free build involves, and what we need from you to start it.
Send us twenty of the worst ones
We build the extraction and show you what it got right, field by field, before you pay anything.