What OCR API should I use for bank statements and invoices with tables?

For bank statements and invoices with tables, you’ll usually want an OCR/document AI API that does more than plain text OCR — specifically one that can handle:

• layout detection
• table extraction
• key-value pairs / forms
• multi-page PDFs
• good accuracy on scanned and low-quality docs

Best options

1. AWS Textract

Best for: bank statements, invoices, forms, tables at scale
Why: Strong table and form extraction, good for structured financial documents.
Pros:

• Excellent table detection
• Key-value pair extraction
• Works well on scanned PDFs and images
• Easy to integrate if you’re already on AWS
  Cons:
• Output can take some post-processing
• Pricing can add up at scale

2. Google Document AI

Best for: high-accuracy invoice and statement parsing
Why: Very strong document understanding, especially for invoices and structured docs.
Pros:

• Great invoice parser and OCR quality
• Strong layout understanding
• Good developer tooling
  Cons:
• Some processors are more specialized and may need tuning
• Can be more complex to configure

3. Azure AI Document Intelligence (formerly Form Recognizer)

Best for: invoices, receipts, bank statements, general document extraction
Why: Reliable structured extraction with good table support.
Pros:

• Good invoice and layout models
• Strong table extraction
• Nice API ergonomics
  Cons:
• Accuracy can vary by document quality
• Some advanced use cases need custom models

If you want the simplest recommendation

• Invoices: Google Document AI or Azure Document Intelligence
• Bank statements with tables: AWS Textract or Google Document AI
• If you want one tool for both: AWS Textract is often the safest all-around choice

Other solid options

• ABBYY Vantage/FlexiCapture — very strong, enterprise-grade, often excellent on difficult documents
• Rossum — good for invoice automation
• Mindee — developer-friendly, especially for invoices and receipts
• Docparser / Nanonets — useful if you want simpler workflow automation rather than raw OCR

My practical recommendation

If your documents are:

• mostly PDFs/images of bank statements and invoices
• need tables preserved
• you care about accuracy more than cheapest price

Start with:

1. AWS Textract
2. Google Document AI
3. Compare on a sample set of your real documents

If you want, I can also give you:

• a head-to-head comparison table
• recommendations by budget / accuracy / ease of use
• or a Python example for the best API.