Invoice data capture software is now good enough that the extraction demonstration tells you almost nothing: every serious product reads a clean invoice competently. The differences appear at the edges, in what happens when the document is poor, the layout is new or the field is ambiguous. Those cases are a small share of the volume and most of the cost, so they are the right place to look when comparing.
Confidence, and whether you can see it
Good capture produces a confidence score per field and lets you set the threshold at which a field goes to a person. Poor capture produces a value and no signal about how sure it was. The second sort feels smoother in a demonstration and generates errors that surface much later, as a payment that was wrong rather than a question that was asked.
The review queue, which is where your team lives
Whatever the accuracy, somebody reviews the doubtful cases, so the review screen is the interface your team uses most. Does it show the document beside the extracted field? Can a correction be made in one keystroke? Does the correction teach the system anything? These unglamorous details determine whether capture saves time in practice or simply moves it.
Supplier identification is a matching problem
Identifying which supplier sent an invoice is not really reading; it is matching against your existing supplier list, using a name, a tax reference or bank details. Products that do this well cut a lot of manual work, and products that do it badly create duplicate supplier records, which is one of the more expensive messes to clean up afterwards.
Questions people ask about invoice data capture software
How do we trial capture properly?
Run your own documents, including the ones your team complains about, and measure the review time you still owe afterwards rather than the headline accuracy.
Does it learn from corrections?
Many products claim to. Ask specifically what a correction changes, whether it is per supplier or global, and how long before you would see the effect.
What about invoices in other currencies?
Extraction usually handles the numbers; the risk is that currency is read from the wrong place on a multi-currency document. Test one if you receive them.