Invoice scanning software is easy to demonstrate and hard to evaluate, because a demonstration uses documents chosen to work. Your own invoices include the handwritten delivery note, the supplier whose layout changed last quarter and the one that arrives as a photograph taken on a phone. Three tests, run on your own worst documents rather than a vendor's clean ones, tell you most of what a trial period will eventually tell you anyway.
Test one: your twenty worst invoices
Pick the twenty documents your team complains about most and run those, not a representative sample. Representative samples are dominated by the easy cases you are already handling fine, so they measure nothing you care about. What you want to know is how the software behaves at the edge, because the edge is where the human time goes and therefore where any saving has to come from.
Test two: what happens when it is unsure
Ask to see the review queue. Software that flags low confidence fields and puts them in front of a person is doing the right thing; software that silently fills a best guess is generating work you will not discover until a payment is wrong. Confidence handling is the single biggest difference between products that look identical in a feature list.
Test three: line level, on a multi-line invoice
Header fields are close to solved and everyone does them well. Lines are where products separate, and lines are what a three-way match needs. Take an invoice with a dozen lines, several of them partial deliveries against one ordered line, and see what comes out. If the answer is a blank line grid, you have learned that this product automates keying but not matching.
Questions people ask about invoice scanning software
Is invoice scanning worth it below a few hundred invoices a month?
Often not on labour saving alone at that volume, but it can still be worth it for the record: a searchable, dated set of invoices with the extracted fields attached has value beyond the minutes saved. Work the arithmetic on your own numbers rather than a rule of thumb.
Do I still need to keep the original document?
Yes. Keep the original as received, whatever the extraction produced, because the original is the evidence and the extraction is an interpretation of it. Your retention obligations attach to the document.
Can it read invoices in more than one format from the same supplier?
Modern extraction is generally layout-agnostic rather than template-driven, so yes, but this is exactly the kind of claim to test on your own documents rather than to accept.