Scan a supplier invoice and the Bitrix24 deal fills itself in — vendor, line items, totals. Email attachments go through the same pipeline. We built it with Google Document AI OCR.
The challenge
Supplier invoices arrived two ways: on paper, and by email. Either way, someone read them and typed the contents into Bitrix24 by hand. Vendor, invoice number, date, line items, totals. If the supplier was new, that person also had to stop and create the company record before they could continue. It was slow, it was nobody's favourite part of the day, and mistyped figures did not stay small problems — they surfaced later as the wrong numbers in a deal.
Short version: the client scans a supplier invoice on their office printer and it arrives in Bitrix24 as a PDF. Our service reads it with Google Document AI, pulls out the vendor, the line items and the totals, and fills in the deal. If the vendor does not exist in the CRM yet, it gets created and linked. Invoices that arrive by email as attachments go through the same pipeline.
What they were doing before
Paper invoices came in with deliveries. Others arrived as email attachments. Both ended up in the same place: someone reading a document and retyping it into Bitrix24.
The retyping was the obvious cost. The less obvious one was the interruptions. New supplier? Stop, create the company record, come back, carry on. Product not in the system? Same again.
And because a person was reading numbers off a page, some of those numbers were wrong. You do not find out at the time. You find out weeks later when a total does not reconcile.
Two ways in, one pipeline
We did not want two systems doing nearly the same thing, so both intake routes feed a single processing path.
The printer. Their office scanner is connected to the server. Staff scan an invoice the way they always have, and the PDF lands in Bitrix24 automatically. No new habit to learn — that mattered more than it sounds, because a system people have to remember to use is a system people forget to use.
Email. When an invoice arrives as an attachment, it is picked up and pushed into the same pipeline. Nobody forwards anything anywhere.
From that point the two routes are identical.
Reading the document
The PDF goes to Google Document AI, which handles the OCR and the structure. That distinction matters: plain OCR gives you a wall of text and leaves you writing fragile rules to guess which number is the total. Document AI returns the document’s actual fields.
We take that output and map it onto the Bitrix24 deal — vendor, invoice number, date, line items, quantities, prices, totals.
Swiss invoices are not a single uniform format, and neither are the suppliers a wrapping business deals with. Layouts vary. Some are German, some are French. Part of the work was making the mapping tolerant of that rather than tuned to one supplier’s template.
What happens to the vendor
This is the part that removed the interruptions.
If the supplier already exists in Bitrix24, the deal links to them. If they do not, the integration creates the company record and links it. The person handling the invoice never stops to go and set something up first.
Products are linked the same way, so the deal reflects what was actually bought rather than a total with no detail behind it.
And you can still do it by hand
There is a manual entry option, and we consider that a feature rather than a gap.
Automation that cannot be overridden is brittle. A smudged scan, an unusual layout, a supplier whose invoice is genuinely strange — these will happen. When they do, someone enters the details manually and the process carries on. Nothing gets stuck, nothing has to wait for us.
We would rather ship something with a working escape hatch than something that handles 95% of cases and jams on the rest.
What changed
Invoices go from arriving to being in the CRM without anyone retyping them. The figures come from the document rather than from someone’s reading of it. Vendor records build up on their own instead of being a task somebody has to remember.
And it works the same whether an invoice came off the scanner, out of an inbox, or was typed in by hand on an awkward day.
Frequently asked questions
Can Bitrix24 read invoices automatically?
Not on its own. Bitrix24 stores the PDF, but extracting fields from it needs an OCR layer. We use Google Document AI and write the results to the deal through the Bitrix24 REST API.
How do scanned documents get into Bitrix24?
The office scanner sends to a connected server, and the PDF is uploaded to Bitrix24 automatically. Staff scan exactly as they did before — no change to how they work.
What if the supplier is not in the CRM yet?
The integration creates the company record and links it to the deal. Nobody has to stop and set up the vendor first.
Does it work with email attachments too?
Yes. Invoices arriving by email as attachments are processed through the same pipeline, with the same result.
What happens when a document cannot be read?
The details are entered manually and the process continues as normal. The automation never blocks work when a document is unusual or poorly scanned.