Converting Tabular Data from PDF or Image no more requires switching between apps

Whether it is a financial analyst, bookkeeper, admin professional, or a small business owner, people frequently deal with bank statements, invoices, reports, etc.

Commonly they receive these data in PDFs, and they are required to get it on a spreadsheet for analysis.

Despite the technological advancements, it is surprising to see many people doing manual entry and copy-paste for getting the table data from PDF or image to their spreadsheet.

There are many standalone converters that convert to CSV or XLSX format , which can then be imported into Excel or Google Sheets.

Even ChatGPT can do the CSV or XLSX conversion.

But I was wondering, why not do it directly inside our spreadsheet, instead of switching between apps online.

The technical process is pretty simple, but there are very few solutions to do this.

So I started tinkering with apps script google, and built a quick solution to identify and extract structured table data from PDFs and images, using AI (optical character recognition).

So the solution is like a sidebar that lives directly inside Google Sheets, where you can upload a PDF or image that has the tabular data, and then you click "Extract Data", and the table data gets written on the active spreadsheet with the layout (rows and columns) preserved.

This way you can extract any tabular data from a PDF or image, without even leaving your Google Sheet.

This improves the workflow and makes it more comfortable for people frequently dealing with bank statements, invoices, reports. They stay inside Google Sheets, and get the data from PDF or image in 1 click, without any tab switching.

As soon as it writes on the active spreadsheet, you also get a "Download CSV" option that instantly gives the .csv file of the extract tabular data. This way you can then make a quick import and get the data on your excel spreadsheet too.

The add-on has got 300 users so far from different countries. The first paying customer was a remote bookkeeper from Australia, who completed around 250 successful extractions in 3 days. This gave an initial confidence that the tool is actually useful.

Then we got 3 sales from USA, out of 56 USA users overall. This gave more confidence that the tool is actually worth someone's money.

Small business owners who do their own bookkeeping find this useful to convert bank statements quickly for analysis.

Bookkeepers usually wanna convert this, analyze, clean the data, and then import into their accounting software. Based on this observation, we also have built an Export feature for Xero users, where we create draft bills in Xero directly from Google Sheets. This is particularly useful for Xero bookkeepers using Google Sheets, as they can stay inside Google Sheets where they usually stage their files, analyze, clean up, and then create bills in 1 click while staying in Google Sheets.

If you are someone dealing with tabular data in PDF or image, give it a try, and let me know if it saved your time, and how we can improve.