2 posts tagged with "automation"

The Statement Processor reads PDF bank and credit card statements, extracts every transaction, and groups them by vendor. It's finished and on GitHub under an MIT license. Building it surfaced a problem worth writing down: even on a clean, digitally-generated PDF straight from the bank, the table extraction sometimes dropped a row, usually the last one in a transaction table. A sum check that compares the extracted transactions against the total the statement already prints on itself is what made the output trustworthy.

Docling already does most of what a batch text-extraction harness needs: it iterates over documents, swaps OCR backends, isolates per-document errors, and exports structured output. For the soviet.recipes project I wrap it in a thin pipeline so I can put different extraction approaches against each other on the same pages and trust the result. Docling does the extraction, but the wrapper prepares the book's curled and shadowed pages first and puts every engine behind one interface, whether it runs through Docling or bypasses it, so routing and scoring stay independent of which tool produced the text.