PDF invoice to UBL/XML invoice convertor tool

Question

I have allot of PDF files which I need to get into my accounting software. The accounting software supports UBL/XML invoices (sample).

I am looking for a tool (software, script etc.) or service to convert my invoices to this format. Preferably it's a software tool which is free or one time buy.

More info on UBL on wikipedia

I already know of Chimpkey (they seem inactive). And I am looking for more so I can do a comparison.

The invoices are all different with various layouts, but here is a sample:

Answer 1

Data extraction from PDFs is not necessarily a trivial solution; however, it's a good time to have this problem in that there are quite a few options based upon what "type" of user you are. Probably the best overall software package (which I've used before to great success) is Tabula:

http://tabula.technology/

... it's open source, and I'm a full stack guy; so it's great from a dev's perspective (as well as being easily in the wheelhouse for a non-dev.) Tabula allows you to extract that data into a CSV or Microsoft Excel spreadsheet using a simple, easy-to-use interface. From there, it's trivial to export it to XML with either Microsoft Office or Libre Office... (as well as a myriad of online tools.) Although, since you mentioned it's accounting software; all accounting software I've ever worked with will allow you to import directly from a CSV.

However, sometimes people want a solution with "support", i.e. a commercial application... Here my recommendation is :

https://pdftables.com/

Finally, if you want more "control" over the flow; you can always look at creating your own "solution" by combining a couple of different Open Source items:

http://www.unixuser.org/~euske/python/pdfminer/
https://poppler.freedesktop.org/
http://www.pdfparser.org/
http://www.foolabs.com/xpdf/portsntools.html

Answer 2

There is a company called Conexiom which offers a service that will do what you ask. They can convert Invoice and Purchase Orders into whatever file you want. See www.conexiom.com.

Answer 3

As pointed out in the answer of George, extracting data extraction of PDF files is not a trivial solution. This is because the PDF specification does not offer any syntactical markup like HTML does (e.g. , , ...). This makes it challenging for software products to "understand" the data.

The tools mentioned by George (Tabula.technology, pdftables.com, ...) are certainly great tools to extract tables from individual files. They won't help you though in case you want a fully automated process which converts PDF to UBL/XML.

I'm the founder of Docparser and we do exactly what you are looking for. We also just published an article on UBL and automated invoice processing. Hope this helps clarify the steps to take. I'd be more than happy to guide through our free trial.