Important Update
As a software developer, there are often times when reinventing the wheel makes no sense. Third-party libraries can often cut costs and development time significantly. The problem is as the old saying goes, “You have to kiss a lot of toads before you find a prince”. Many roads traveled result in disappointment and unnecessary waste of weeks if not months.
Deciding on a third-party library to use results in something similar to a marriage. Your application and therefore your livelihood now depends to some degree on not only their software but their support when things don’t quite fit the bill.
Occasionally you find the holy grail, A provider whose offering not only meets your needs but their support is so fantastic you feel confident if you do it a wall, they are there to help. One such software provider is BYTESCOUT.
I have been a customer of ByteScout now since 2016. I have used their PDF Extractor SDK to design my service which accepts invoices in the form of PDF files and processes any info on them to a database with full customer mapping.
This is an incredibly difficult task normally. There is a huge difference between just OCR’ing a page and actually picking items from it and placing them in the proper fields in a database. From terrible images, invisible fonts, embedded garbage to extremely complicated layouts, it can be a significant challenge.
Using the ByteScout PDF Extractor library and the ByteScout PDF Viewer SDK’s I was able to create a tool to not only process invoices in under 3 seconds but I am able to define (map) new vendors now in under 10 mins where it was taking 3 or 4 days.
I now have over 1000 vendors defined and process 10k a month. This is not a lot but that’s due to Covid, not capability.
Every step of the way as If I ran into any issues or just needed ideas to better approach the problem ByteScout support was there. They have done everything from correct bugs, to add new features that I required, in days not months!
I have been a developer for over 40 years and have dealt with many third-party tools and companies. ByteScout has been the best I have ever dealt with and that includes Google who is my hero. There is literally nothing this company has denied me since purchasing the product.
I could not be happier with the pricing, performance, and support I have received from ByteScout.
– Jack Dwight Fitchett
Owner, Zero-Paper.com,
Founder CTO Comcash Point of Sale LLC, Liquor Monitor LLC, Dr. EZ Billings DBA
