RPA Invoice Processing Bot

A Python-based Robotic Process Automation (RPA) bot for automatically processing PDF invoices. Extracts key data, validates information, and generates reports.

Features

• PDF Text Extraction: Uses pdfplumber for direct text extraction
• OCR Support: Falls back to EasyOCR for scanned/image-based PDFs
• Data Validation: Validates dates, amounts, and vendor information
• GUI Interface: Simple Tkinter GUI for folder selection and processing
• CSV Reporting: Generates structured CSV reports of extracted data
• Email Alerts: Sends summary emails when validation thresholds are exceeded
• Configurable: Uses YAML config file for easy customization
• Logging: Comprehensive logging to files and console
• Docker Ready: Includes Docker configuration for containerized deployment

Quick Start

Requirements

• Python 3.10+
• pip (Python package installer)

Installation

1. Clone or download the project
2. Navigate to the project directory
3. Install dependencies:

   pip install -r requirements.txt

Usage

Run the GUI application:

python run_bot.py

This launches a simple GUI where you can:

• Select an input folder containing PDF invoices
• Click "Start Processing" to process all PDFs
• View progress and results

Configuration

Edit config.yaml to customize:

• Input/output directories
• Email settings (sender, recipient, SMTP credentials)
• OCR settings (languages, retry counts)
• Regex patterns for data extraction
• Validation thresholds

Troubleshooting & Tips

OCR Not Working?

• Make sure you have Tesseract installed if using external OCR tools.
• Scanned PDFs should be at least 300 DPI for best results.
• If the bot skips a PDF, check logs/bot.log for details on extraction failure.

Permission Errors

• Ensure the output/ and logs/ folders are writable.
• On Windows, avoid running the bot from restricted folders like Program Files.

Customizing Extraction

• If the vendor or amount isn't being picked up, check the regex_patterns in config.yaml.
• You can test your patterns on regex101.com.

Sample Data

The samples/invoices/ folder contains 6 sample PDF files with various formats and validation scenarios:

• invoice_001_valid.pdf: Valid invoice
• invoice_002_invalid_date.pdf: Invalid date format
• invoice_003_missing_total.pdf: Missing total amount
• invoice_004_scanned.pdf: Image-based (needs OCR)
• invoice_005_alt_format.pdf: Different layout
• invoice_006_negative_total.pdf: Invalid negative amount

Output

Processing generates:

• output/invoice_report.csv: Structured CSV with extracted data and validation results
• logs/bot.log: Detailed processing logs
• Email alerts (if configured and validation threshold exceeded)

Docker

Build and run with Docker:

# Build image
docker build -t rpa-invoice-bot .

# Run with volumes
docker run -v "$(pwd)/samples:/app/samples" -v "$(pwd)/output:/app/output" -v "$(pwd)/logs:/app/logs" rpa-invoice-bot

Dependencies

• Python 3.10+
• pdfplumber
• easyocr
• pyyaml
• pandas
• Pillow

Install with: pip install -r requirements.txt

License

MIT License