tl;dr
Data extraction is the process of pulling specific pieces of information, an amount, a vendor name, a due date, a line item, out of a document or system and converting them into structured, usable data.
In finance, this most often means turning an invoice, receipt, or contract into fields a system can act on. Modern data extraction combines OCR, to read the document, with AI that understands what each piece of extracted text actually represents, which is what lets a system code and match a document correctly rather than just digitizing it.
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