Odoo Bill Digitisation: OCR for Vendor Bills

Typing vendor bills is slow and error-prone. Odoo can read bills from PDFs and images and create draft bills automatically, so accounts payable staff review instead of typing.

How it works

1. A bill arrives by email, upload or scanner.
2. Odoo sends it to its OCR service.
3. The service returns the vendor, bill number, dates, amounts, taxes and sometimes lines.
4. Odoo creates a draft bill with the PDF attached.
5. A user checks and posts it.

Setting up an email alias

The easiest way to capture bills is an email address such as bills@yourcompany.com that forwards to the purchase journal's alias in Odoo. Ask suppliers to send bills there. Office scanners can send to the same address.

Digitisation settings

In accounting settings, choose whether bills are digitised automatically on arrival or only when a user clicks a button. Automatic is faster; manual saves credits if many documents are not bills.

Improving accuracy

• Make sure vendors exist in Odoo with correct tax IDs, so they are matched.
• Set default expense accounts and taxes on vendors.
• Link bills to purchase orders, so lines and quantities are checked against what was ordered.

Review workflow

OCR is not a replacement for review. Use a simple flow:

• Drafts created by OCR
• AP clerk checks vendor, amount and account
• Approval for bills over a threshold
• Posting and payment

See our guide to Odoo approval workflows for setting up approvals.

Costs

Each digitised document uses credits. Estimate your monthly bill volume and buy credits accordingly. For very high volumes, compare with dedicated AP automation tools.

Beyond OCR

For more complex documents, such as multi-page freight invoices, AI-based extraction can go further. Read about AI invoice processing in ERP or our AI document processing solution.