Turn invoices and receipts into text your AP tools can use.

the-problem

Accounts payable teams receive invoices in every shape. A vendor emails a PDF, a contractor texts a photo, a supplier uploads a scan to a portal. Each format needs its own reader before any approval logic can run. Teams that only handle PDFs miss the photos and scans, and those invoices sit in a manual queue.

how-txtfetch-solves-it

txtfetch reads the invoice, whatever the format, and returns the text. It does not return a typed total field or a typed vendor field. Pair it with your own rules or an LLM to pull those values out. For a Word, Excel or HTML invoice, pass format=markdown on the same request to get the line-item table as a pipe table. A PDF invoice comes back as lines of text, one line for each row.

• OCR runs automatically on photographed and scanned invoices, with no separate vision service.
• format=markdown returns a Word, Excel or HTML line-item table as a pipe table. A PDF invoice comes back as lines of text.
• One endpoint reads a vendor's PDF, a phone photo of a receipt, a spreadsheet, and an email attachment.
• Async job and webhook mode keeps large batch runs from blocking approval queues.
• Idempotency-Key support stops a retried upload from double-processing an invoice.
• The response includes the text and the table rows, ready for your own totals logic.

curl -X POST https://api.txtfetch.com/v1/extract \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $TXTFETCH_KEY" \
  -F file=@invoice.pdf

import os
import requests

with open("invoice.pdf", "rb") as f:
    r = requests.post(
        "https://api.txtfetch.com/v1/extract",
        headers={"Authorization": f"Bearer {os.environ['TXTFETCH_KEY']}"},
        files={"file": f},
    )

print(r.json()["extracted_text"])

import { readFile } from "node:fs/promises";

const file = new Blob([await readFile("invoice.pdf")]);
const form = new FormData();
form.append("file", file, "invoice.pdf");

const res = await fetch("https://api.txtfetch.com/v1/extract", {
  method: "POST",
  headers: { Authorization: `Bearer ${process.env.TXTFETCH_KEY}` },
  body: form,
});

const { extracted_text } = await res.json();
console.log(extracted_text);

package main

import (
	"bytes"
	"encoding/json"
	"fmt"
	"io"
	"mime/multipart"
	"net/http"
	"os"
)

type extractResponse struct {
	Status        string `json:"status"`
	ExtractedText string `json:"extracted_text"`
}

func main() {
	f, err := os.Open("invoice.pdf")
	if err != nil {
		panic(err)
	}
	defer f.Close()

	var body bytes.Buffer
	writer := multipart.NewWriter(&body)
	part, err := writer.CreateFormFile("file", "invoice.pdf")
	if err != nil {
		panic(err)
	}
	if _, err := io.Copy(part, f); err != nil {
		panic(err)
	}
	writer.Close()

	req, err := http.NewRequest("POST", "https://api.txtfetch.com/v1/extract", &body)
	if err != nil {
		panic(err)
	}
	req.Header.Set("Authorization", "Bearer "+os.Getenv("TXTFETCH_KEY"))
	req.Header.Set("Content-Type", writer.FormDataContentType())

	resp, err := http.DefaultClient.Do(req)
	if err != nil {
		panic(err)
	}
	defer resp.Body.Close()

	var result extractResponse
	if err := json.NewDecoder(resp.Body).Decode(&result); err != nil {
		panic(err)
	}
	fmt.Println(result.ExtractedText)
}

{
  "status": "success",
  "extracted_text": "..."
}

faq

Does txtfetch return a total or vendor field from an invoice?

No. It returns the invoice as text. Pull a typed total or vendor field with your own rules or an LLM.

Can txtfetch read a photographed invoice from a phone?

Yes. OCR runs automatically on the photo, and the response has the same shape as a digital-native PDF.

How do I keep the line-item table readable for my parser?

For a Word, Excel or HTML invoice, add format=markdown to the request. The table comes back as a pipe table. A PDF invoice has no table in the output. Each row is a line of space-separated text. See /docs/tables.

related-reading

• Extract tables for RAG →
• OCR scanned documents through one API →
• Extract text from PDF →
• Extract text from a scanned PDF →
• OCR a photographed or scanned image →
• Barcodes and QR codes on invoices →
• Text vs Markdown vs element JSON, compared →
• Get an API key →