Your first extraction

By the end of this you will have pulled real data out of a real document. Use something you actually work with — an invoice, a receipt, a statement. A real document tells you far more than a sample one.

You get 10 free pages when you sign up, and no card is needed to complete this.

1. Create a parser

From the dashboard, create a new parser. There are three things to set.

Name it after the kind of document, not the sender. "Supplier invoices" is right; "Northgate invoices" means you will end up with forty parsers.

Choose a parser type:

Most people want Field Extraction. Pick that unless you specifically want a full text conversion.

Choose how to define fields. Field Extraction needs to know what to look for. The fastest route is AI detect fields: upload one sample and Parsli proposes a set of fields from what it sees. You can also start from a ready-made template, or add fields by hand.

2. Send it a document

Drag your document onto the upload area. Parsli processes it and shows you what it found.

A single-page document costs one page from your balance. A five-page PDF costs five. See how pages are counted.

3. Read the result

You will get each field with the value found. Some things worth noticing:

• An empty field means the engine could not find that value. That is deliberate. It abstains rather than guessing, so an empty field is a fact about your document, not a failure.
• Confidence flags uncertainty. A low-confidence value is one to check yourself before trusting it.
• Tables come back as rows, one object per line item, not as a flat blob you have to unpick.

4. Fix what is wrong

Almost nobody gets a perfect result first time, and the fix is usually small. In order of how often it works:

1. Rename the field to say what you mean. amount is ambiguous on a document with a subtotal, tax, and total. total_including_tax is not.
2. Add a description to the field. One sentence: "The final amount payable, after tax and any discount."
3. Add Extraction instructions. For genuine edge cases — "if no PO number is printed, use the invoice number instead".
4. Check the Field type matches. A currency amount typed as text will come back as text, punctuation and all.

Change one thing, run the document again, see what moved. Changing four things at once tells you nothing about which one worked.

5. Point it somewhere

Once the data is right, connect the parser to wherever it should land — a Google Sheet, your accounting system, an automation tool, or your own application. See send data out.

What you have now

A parser that handles this kind of document from any sender, in any layout. Send it fifty invoices and you get fifty consistent records.

Next: how Parsli works for the pieces underneath, or defining what to extract to sharpen your fields.