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auto extract data from a PDF

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Posted on by sammary

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A company I do some contracting work for receives many invoices in PDF form. I would like to be able to extract information from these invoices and create a single csv file.

I have used Excel Power Query to read the PDF so that part is doable, but very manual and not feasible with the volume we have. Could Microsoft Power Apps and Microsoft Power Automate tools be able to perform the automated tasks that I want to do.

The PDF files, in general, have similar formats depending on the vendor we receive them from.

I'm pretty good with Excel, learning VBA and used to do a bit of C programming and UNIX shell scripting back in the day. With this background is this an achievable task and is there a way to do some testing before we have to purchase licenses? We are a very small company so spending a lot on this solution is probably not an option.

Sorry if this is a disjointed request because I'm not really sure what I'm asking for.

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SanmeshG 1,947 Moderator on at

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Hi @sammary ,

I am assuming you are little new to Power Automate. I would recommend you to check out the AI Builder - Invoice Processing Model using which you can train the models using the PDFs that you have and the flow can run automatically based on a trigger and create a csv file.

Alternatively you can also consider checking out Power Automate Desktop to extract the data and trigger that desktop flow using a cloud flow.

Please mark this as a solution if this answers your question.

Thanks,
Sanmesh

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sammary 158 on at

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Sanmesh,
Thanks for getting back to me. Actually I am VERY new to Power Automate and will be doing a lot more research on how it can be used to solve my problem. Processing the invoice is just part of the problem, I also have to extract the invoice from an email.
Now that I now this committee exists I'm sure I will have lots of questions going forward.

What is your recommendation as to where I should start reading about Power Automate?

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SanmeshG 1,947 Moderator on at

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Hi @sammary ,

Welcome to the community! Happy to assist 😊

You can go through the Microsoft's official Documentation for Power Automate that's one of the best resources to get started.

1. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/power-automate/

2. https://www.matthewdevaney.com/

Matthew has written some amazing blogs on PowerApps and Power Automate.

Additionality you can learn a lot from the following YT Channels of Reza and Shane ,

3. https://www.youtube.com/rezadorrani

4. https://www.youtube.com/@ShanesCows

Hope this helps!

Thank You!

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