AI invoice data extraction for accountants and their clients

You receive an invoice. An accountant, a junior, or a client opens it, reads it, and types the same fields into accounting software that the supplier already typed when they made the invoice. Number, date, due date, amount, VAT, supplier, variable symbol, IBAN. Twenty-something fields. Times every invoice. Times every client. Every month.

That’s the work most accountants and bookkeepers still do every day. Verifical takes it away.

The problem with manual invoice data entry

Manual data entry isn’t just slow. It’s where most bookkeeping errors come from. A misread VAT rate. A transposed invoice number. A wrong IBAN that takes a week to surface, when a payment bounces back. Every error has to be found, corrected, and re-exported. Usually by the same person who did the original entry, on a different day, under deadline.

Most accountants we talk to spend two to five hours per client per month just typing invoice data into their accounting software. For a firm with twenty SME clients, that’s a full working week, every month, spent moving data from one place to another. No analysis, no advice, no value the client would pay extra for.

There are three problems with how this is usually solved today:

1. Generic OCR tools read characters but don’t understand invoices. They get the right number out of the right box on a known template, then break the moment the supplier changes layout.
2. AI extraction tools (Dext, Hubdoc, Klippa, Rossum, and others) work well, but most are built for accounts payable inside a single company. They’re not designed for the accountant-client setup, where documents move between two parties and need to land in Pohoda, not NetSuite.
3. Structured e-invoicing standards (Peppol/UBL across the EU, ISDOC in Czechia and Slovakia) already contain the invoice data in clean, structured form. But most extraction tools treat these files like any other PDF and run them through OCR anyway, charging for AI on data that didn’t need it.

Verifical was built to solve all three.

How Verifical reads invoices

When a document arrives in Verifical – whether the client uploaded it, a supplier sent it through the supplier portal, or it came in by email – Verifical reads it and extracts the data automatically.

For most invoices, Verifical uses AI that reads documents the way a person would: by understanding what each field actually means, not by matching positions on a template. There’s no template to build, no training period, and no setup for new suppliers. The first invoice from a brand-new supplier is read just as well as the thousandth from a known one. Layouts can change, languages can change, formats can change – the AI handles it. It works for scanned PDFs, photographs, regular PDFs from any accounting software and other formats.

This is the heart of what Verifical does, and it’s where the time savings come from. Most of the invoices a typical SME receives still arrive as PDFs or images. The job of turning those into clean, exportable data – which used to take an accountant hours per client per month – is what AI takes off the table.

For the smaller subset of invoices that arrive as structured e-invoice files (Peppol/UBL, ISDOC), Verifical reads them directly from the XML, no AI needed because the data is already structured. This makes those invoices essentially free to process. As EU mandates expand and more suppliers move to structured e-invoicing, more of your invoices will flow through this path automatically. See incoming e-invoices for the full list of supported formats.

This combined approach matters more than it sounds. A typical SME has a mix of suppliers: some send e-invoices because they’re on a modern invoicing platform, most send PDFs from their accounting software, some still send phone photos of paper receipts. With Verifical, all of them land in the same place, ready to export.

What gets extracted

Verifical extracts every field that matters for bookkeeping. The list currently includes:

• Invoice number
• Issue date, tax point date, due date
• Total amount, net amount
• VAT amount, VAT rate
• Currency
• Supplier name, supplier address
• Supplier company ID, supplier VAT ID
• Variable symbol, constant symbol. specific symbol.
• Bank account, IBAN, SWIFT/BIC
• Purchase order number
• And other fields

These are the fields that actually matter for SME bookkeeping. They cover everything an accountant needs to record the invoice in accounting software, reconcile against payments, and meet VAT reporting requirements.

What Verifical doesn’t extract today: line-item detail. For typical SME bookkeeping, header-level data is what gets recorded in the accounting system anyway. Line items are mostly useful for larger AP teams running three-way matching. They’re on the roadmap but not in the current release.

What happens after extraction

Extracting data isn’t much use if you still have to retype it somewhere else. Once Verifical reads an invoice, the data goes straight to the accountant’s chosen export format:

• Generic CSV. Configurable column mapping, works with any system that accepts CSV imports.
• Pohoda XML. The most common Czech accounting software. Verifical produces a Pohoda-compatible XML that imports cleanly, no manual edits required.
• DATEV (Germany and Austria) – coming soon.
• Xero (UK) – coming soon.
• QuickBooks – coming soon.

This is the part that closes the loop. The document arrives, the data gets read, the export file is ready, and the accountant imports it into their accounting software. End to end, no retyping.

See the full list and details on the export to accounting software page.

Built for the accountant-client relationship

This is the real difference between Verifical and most extraction tools on the market.

Dext, Hubdoc, Rossum, Klippa, and Tipalti are built for accounts payable inside a single company. One company has invoices, the same company processes them. The user is the AP clerk.

Verifical is built for the relationship between an accountant and their clients. Documents start at the client (or the client’s suppliers), get reviewed and extracted, and end up in the accountant’s accounting software. The accountant has many clients. Each client has many suppliers. The whole platform is designed around that, with strict separation between companies, status tracking per client, and a delivery trail both sides can see.

If you run an accounting practice serving SMEs in Europe, this is the difference between a tool that fits your workflow and one that fights it. More on this on the page accountants.