How to Extract Data Directly from Images or PDFs and Make Them Insightful

In today’s workflow-heavy industries—construction, logistics, finance—documents still arrive in the most inconvenient formats: scans, mobile photos, and unstructured PDFs. The result? Teams spend time not just extracting data, but interpreting and organizing it to make sense of what’s happening across jobs, vendors, and budgets.

If you’re a product manager or platform owner looking to automate this flow, you’re not just trying to “read” documents. You’re trying to turn them into structured, insightful data.

In this post, we’ll show how Veryfi OCR APIs and AnyDocs extracts structured data from images and pdfs then makes that data immediately useful for automation, analysis, and business decision-making.

Why Extracting Text Isn’t Enough

Plenty of tools can convert text from an image or PDF. But most fail to turn that text into insightful data. Here’s why:

• OCR gives you raw characters, not meaning
• Most outputs are flat text, not field-labeled
• Context—like which line item belongs to which total—is lost
• Relationships between fields (e.g., vendor ↔ tax ID ↔ invoice total) are unclear

To get real value, your system needs more than OCR. It needs document intelligence that understands structure, context, and relationships.

From Raw Text to Business Insight: How AI-Powered OCR API Works

Veryfi AnyDocs combines OCR, computer vision, and a Multimodal LLM to extract data in a structured format—fast, accurately, and at scale.

Here’s what happens behind the scenes:

1. You upload an image or PDF (e.g., a receipt, invoice, BOL, PO)
2. AnyDocs classifies the document type automatically
3. It extracts structured fields—like totals, vendor names, dates, line items
4. You get back clean JSON—mapped to your workflows, APIs, or dashboards

Real Example: From Image to Insights

A user captures a grocery receipt using the Veryfi Lens mobile app. The document is uploaded as a mobile image—no formatting, no prep. Instead of just returning raw text, Veryfi Receipts OCR API processes the receipt and delivers a structured JSON output.

This is what insight-ready data looks like:

• 🛒 Multiple line items categorized and labeled
• 🧾 Receipt-level metadata: date, location, vendor, payment type
• 📊 Aggregated totals and quantities for reconciliation
• 📍 Geolocation + vendor metadata for spend reporting
  

Your system can now:

• Automatically reconcile purchases with job budgets
• Categorize and route expenses for review
• Integrate structured data into ERPs, analytics, or compliance checks
  

This is the difference between just extracting text—and extracting actionable intelligence.

Supported Document Types

Veryfi OCR APIs support: 

• Receipts 
• Invoices 
• Purchase Orders
• Bank Statements
• Bills of Lading
• Customs forms

For commonly used docs like receipts and invoices, prebuilt extractors are available. For more specialized forms, AnyDocs uses customizable blueprints that ensure field-level accuracy across formats. See the list of supported documents. 

Final Takeaway: From Document to Data, Then to Insight

Getting data from images or PDFs is step one. Turning that data into insight—and action—is where the real value happens. With Veryfi, you can transform unstructured documents into structured intelligence in seconds—ready to power your product, platform, or process with confidence.

How to Get Started: 

1. Create a Veryfi account → Sign up
2. Upload a document or send via API
3. Get back structured, insight-ready data in seconds