From 200-page supplier PDFs to a live catalog: an automated price-list pipeline
Distributors live and die by their price lists — and most arrive as messy supplier PDFs that someone retypes by hand. We built a pipeline that reads those PDFs with AI, structures every line, and turns a stack of documents into a clean, matched catalog.
- · Layout-agnostic
- · Credit-metered
- · Privacy-minded
The brief
New supplier price lists landed constantly — as PDFs, in every layout imaginable. Staff retyped them into spreadsheets line by line: slow, expensive, and error-prone. The ask was simple: stop the manual data entry without losing accuracy.
The extraction pipeline
- 01 Upload Drop in the supplier PDF(s)
- 02 Pre-check Detect scanned vs digital, page count
- 03 AI extract Gemini reads pages in parallel batches
- 04 Structure Rows → SKU, description, price, units
- 05 Match Align to the existing catalog
- 06 Export Clean Excel workbook out
Pages are extracted in concurrent batches, so a long catalog finishes in minutes rather than a day of typing.
Before and after
- Hours per supplier list
- Typos priced into quotes
- Bottlenecked on one person
- Updates lag the market
- Minutes per list
- Consistent structured output
- Self-serve upload + download
- Catalog stays current
Built for real ops
Layout-agnostic
Different suppliers, different templates — the AI reads the content, not a fixed schema, so new formats don't need new code.
Credit-metered
Usage runs on a credit balance with an audit trail, so cost per job is transparent and controllable.
Privacy-minded
Uploaded PDFs and generated workbooks are processed and cleaned up — scratch files don't linger in storage.
Self-serve
A simple web app: upload, watch the job, download the workbook. No engineer in the loop for day-to-day runs.
Stack
The result
The team stopped retyping price lists. Supplier PDFs now go in one side and a clean, matched catalog comes out the other — fast enough that pricing keeps pace with suppliers instead of trailing a week behind.
Frequently asked
Both digital and scanned supplier price lists, across varied layouts. Because the AI reads content rather than a fixed template, new supplier formats work without custom code.
As a clean, structured Excel workbook matched against your existing catalog — ready to import or quote from.
Extraction is structured and reviewable, and the pipeline is built so a person can spot-check output before it feeds quotes — far more consistent than line-by-line manual entry.
Still retyping supplier PDFs?
Send us a sample price list. We'll show you the structured catalog it becomes — and what the pipeline would cost you.
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