Document classification software

Document classification software works out what each document is, such as an invoice, a contract, a claim form, a medical record or a letter, so it can be named, filed and routed without someone sorting the pile by hand. It's the step that makes a digital mailroom or a mixed batch of scanned documents manageable.

How documents are classified

• Barcodes and separator sheets: exact and cheap for documents you produce yourself; see document separation.
• Keywords and rules: a phrase such as "Explanation of Benefits" or a form number identifies the document type.
• Layout: the arrangement of the page identifies forms from known senders.
• AI: machine learning and language models classify documents by their content, even mixed stacks of types the software hasn't seen before.

Choosing software

SimpleIndex offers document classification by barcodes, rules and keywords, and optional AI, then names, files and routes each document; see document routing. For very high volumes of varied incoming documents, ABBYY FlexiCapture adds trainable classifiers and verification. See also intelligent document processing.