How to Automate Your First Document Workflow This Week
Most articles about document automation talk about the benefits. This one skips that. You already know manually processing invoices, onboarding documents, or supplier records wastes time.
What you need is a working workflow by Friday. Here's how to build one.
Table of Contents
Pick the Right First Workflow
The best first workflow to automate is the one your team processes most often and complains about the most. For most businesses, that's one of three things:
Supplier invoices. You receive them by email in a dozen different formats. Someone reads each one, types the vendor name, invoice number, line items, and total into a spreadsheet or accounting system. Then someone else checks their work. This is a perfect candidate.
New employee onboarding documents. ID documents, signed contracts, bank details, tax forms. Every hire generates a stack of paperwork that HR manually reviews, enters into your HRIS, and files. A lot of it is repetitive, and the cost of errors is high.
Client intake forms or applications. Any business that processes applications, loan requests, or insurance claims deals with structured documents that require consistent extraction across high volumes.
For this guide, we'll use supplier invoices as the example. The steps are identical for any other document type.
Step 1: Set Up Piwi.ai
Go to piwi.ai and create an account. If your invoices contain sensitive financial data and you'd prefer nothing to leave your device, use the offline version at offline.piwi.ai instead. It's free, requires no account, and runs entirely in your browser using local AI.
For the offline version, you'll also need Ollama installed to run the local AI model. Setup takes around five minutes and you only do it once.
Either way, you're ready to process documents within minutes of starting. There's no template building, no training phase, and no developer required.
Step 2: Define What You Want to Extract
Before uploading anything, decide what structured data you need from each invoice. A typical invoice workflow extracts:
- Vendor name
- Invoice number
- Invoice date
- Due date
- Line items (description, quantity, unit price)
- Subtotal, tax, and total
- Payment terms
- Bank or payment details
Piwi.ai has a built-in schema for invoices that covers these fields out of the box. If your invoices include something specific to your industry, like a project code, a purchase order reference, or a cost center, you can add those fields to the schema in a few clicks. No coding required.
This schema step is what separates a document processing tool from a general-purpose AI. When you define the schema upfront, every extraction maps to the same structured output, regardless of how different each invoice looks.
Step 3: Upload Your Documents
Upload a batch of invoices. PDFs, scanned images, JPEG, PNG, and TIFF files are all supported. If your invoices come as email attachments, download a week's worth and upload them together.
Piwi.ai will automatically:
- Classify each document. It confirms each file is an invoice and flags anything that doesn't match, like a statement or a delivery note mixed into the batch.
- Extract structured data from each document according to your schema. This handles variation in layout, font, language, and quality automatically.
- Validate the extraction with a second independent AI pass. Every field extracted in pass one is cross-checked in pass two. Discrepancies are flagged before any output is produced, which is how the system reaches 98% accuracy.
You don't trigger these steps manually. Upload the files and the pipeline runs.
Step 4: Review and Validate
Once processing is complete, you'll see the results for each document. Fields that were extracted cleanly appear with their values. Fields that were flagged, because the value was missing, ambiguous, or conflicted between the two AI passes, are highlighted for your review.
This is the human-in-the-loop moment. For a clean invoice, you may have nothing to review at all. For a low-quality scan or an unusual layout, you might correct one or two fields. Either way, you're reviewing exceptions, not re-entering data.
If you uploaded a batch of onboarding documents instead of invoices, this is also where Piwi.ai's Aggregate step runs. It cross-references entities across all documents in the batch: the name on the ID versus the name on the contract, the bank account number on the form versus the one in the supporting letter. Any inconsistency surfaces here before you sign off.
Step 5: Export and Connect
Once reviewed, export your structured data. The default export is a clean CSV or JSON file with one row per document and one column per extracted field. Every invoice in your batch becomes a structured record, ready to import into your accounting system, your ERP, or your spreadsheet.
If your workflow ends with filling out a PDF template, such as a payment approval form or a summary report, Piwi.ai's Intelligent Mapping will place each extracted value into the correct field of your template automatically. The output is a completed PDF, no copy-paste involved.
For recurring workflows, you can save the pipeline configuration and re-run it on the next batch in seconds.
What to Automate Next
Once your invoice workflow is running, the natural next steps are:
Supplier onboarding. New vendor setup requires registration documents, bank details, and compliance certificates. The same pipeline handles it with a different schema.
Employee onboarding. One batch upload per new hire: ID, contract, bank form, tax declaration. Cross-validation across all documents catches mismatches before they reach your HRIS.
Client applications. Any form-based process where you receive the same document type repeatedly is a strong candidate. The schema stays the same; only the input documents change.
Each workflow you automate removes a category of manual work permanently, not just for this month's invoices but for every invoice your business will ever receive.
FAQs
Q: Do I need to train the AI on my specific invoice formats? No. Piwi.ai's AI understands invoice layouts without training data. If you have a non-standard document type, define a custom schema and the system adapts to it.
Q: What if an invoice is a bad scan or low resolution? Piwi.ai will extract what it can and flag fields it wasn't able to read with confidence. You review the flagged fields manually. The system never silently guesses.
Q: How long does processing take? Most documents process in a few seconds. A batch of 50 invoices typically completes in under two minutes in the cloud version. Offline processing depends on your local hardware.
Q: Can multiple people on my team use the same workflow? Yes. Team access, shared pipelines, and role-based permissions are available in the paid plans at piwi.ai.
Start your first workflow at piwi.ai. The offline version at offline.piwi.ai is free with no account required.