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Aug 18 • General Discussion 💬
Spent 3 months building the "perfect" invoice parser. It processed exactly 0 invoices successfully.
Here's the painful journey and what actually worked:
MONTH 1: The Regex Nightmare
Built custom patterns for every vendor format
Code looked like: (?:Invoice\s*#?\s*:?\s*)([A-Z0-9-]+)
Accuracy: 60% on good days
Broke completely when vendors changed templates
MONTH 2: The Framework Phase
Added PyPDF2 + Tabula + Tesseract OCR
Created a 500-line Python monster
Accuracy jumped to 75%
Processing time: 2 minutes per invoice
Still failed on scanned documents
MONTH 3: The API Frankenstein
Cost: $0.50 per invoice
Accuracy: 85%
Maintenance: Daily firefighting
Then my client said: "This is worse than manual. We're going back to data entry."
That hurt. But it forced me to rethink everything.
THE SOLUTION (built in one afternoon):
3 nodes in n8n:
1. Email trigger (watches for attachments)
3. Google Sheets append
That's it. No regex. No complex logic. No maintenance.
CURRENT STATS:
- Processing: 8,000+ invoices/month
- Accuracy: 99.2%
- Failed documents: ~60/month (mostly corrupted files)
- Setup time per client: 45 minutes
- Maintenance: Check once a week, fix maybe 1 thing
- Revenue: $1,200/month per client
The painful lesson: I spent 3 months building what I thought was impressive. Clients just wanted their invoices in a spreadsheet.
What overcomplicated monster are you maintaining that could be 3 simple nodes?
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Spent 3 months building the "perfect" invoice parser. It processed exactly 0 invoices successfully.
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