The Short Shipment Nobody Checked — Reconciling a PO Against What Actually Arrived
Most document-extraction tools read one document. The job that costs money is comparing two — what you ordered against what turned up. Here is what that check is worth, and what the tools cost.
A supplier ships 46 of something you ordered 50 of. The packing slip says 46. The invoice says 50. Nobody compares them, because comparing them is somebody's afternoon and the boxes need putting away.
That is four units, once. Across a year of deliveries it is a number, and it is a number that only ever runs one direction.
This is about the software that checks — and, more usefully, about what the check is actually worth before you buy anything to do it.
First: is this a problem you have?
Work this out before reading further, because for many businesses the answer is no.
You probably do have this problem if: you take more than a few deliveries a week, you order the same lines repeatedly so price drift is possible, your supplier invoices separately from delivery (so the discrepancy is not obvious at the door), or you have ever found a short shipment weeks later.
You probably do not if: deliveries are infrequent and small enough that the person unpacking is the same person who ordered, and they would notice.
A reconciliation tool has no value if you would catch it anyway.
What the extraction market charges
The tracked vendors in this space price by document volume:
| Vendor | Published price | Read |
|---|---|---|
| Parseur | "Starts at $39/month" (annual, 100 pages); "$99/mo for 1,000 pages (10c/page)"; free tier 20 pages/month permanently | (2026-07-05) |
| Docsumo | Was "$499 / month" Starter, up to 5,000 pages, on the 5 Jul 2026 page — withdrawn since: paid plans now read "Talk to us" (re-read 2026-08-11; a free tier remains as of 2026-08-14) |
Note Parseur's permanent free tier at 20 pages a month. For a business taking five deliveries a week, that is not enough — but for a business taking five a month, it is free and this article is over.
And note what these tools do: they extract fields from a document. Comparing two documents to each other is usually a step you build afterwards, in a spreadsheet or a script.
What the actual job is
Extraction is the easy half. The job that saves money has three parts:
- Read the purchase order — line items, quantities, agreed prices.
- Read the packing slip or delivery note — what physically arrived.
- Compare them and flag the differences — short quantities, substituted lines, prices that do not match what was agreed.
Part 3 is where the money is, and it is the part most tools leave to you.
The self-hosted option
Cargora is a self-hosted logistics document extractor for POs and packing slips — $49.00, one time (product page, read 2026-08-01) — described by its own page as "an open alternative to Parseur, with reconciliation built in."
And, as with the rest of this family, it runs on your own model key:
"Cargora requires an API key from OpenAI, Anthropic, or a local Ollama instance. Your key is stored in your own database and transmitted only in the outbound request you trigger; it's never logged, echoed, or passed…"
With a local Ollama instance, your supplier pricing and delivery records never leave your infrastructure at all — which for commercially sensitive supply terms is a genuine consideration, not a marketing line.
The three limits, quoted
Because they decide whether it fits, and the product states all three itself:
"Is extraction fully automated with no review?" — "No — Cargora is designed for human-in-the-loop review. You correct any field on screen before it enters your records or a reconciliation."
That is the right design for this job. A reconciliation that silently mis-reads a quantity produces a confident wrong answer, which is worse than no answer — you would raise a credit claim your supplier can disprove.
"Does it integrate directly with my ERP?" — "No — Cargora exports clean CSV or JSON… It does not offer a live, direct API integration."
"What about PDFs?" — "Image formats work reliably with all three providers. PDFs are supported natively by Anthropic; OpenAI and Ollama treat PDFs as best-effort, so for best PDF results use Anthropic or convert to PNG first."
Purchase orders and packing slips are overwhelmingly PDFs. So the privacy-maximal configuration — local Ollama — is again the one that needs a conversion step. That is a real friction and it is the same trade-off as every other tool in this family.
What the check is worth
Do this arithmetic before buying anything, including ours.
Take your last three months of deliveries. Pick ten at random. Compare the PO to the packing slip by hand.
- If you find nothing — you do not have this problem, and no software will create value here. Stop, and be pleased.
- If you find one or two discrepancies — multiply by your delivery volume and annualise it. That number is the honest budget for solving this, and it is the only number that should decide the purchase.
We are not going to publish an industry "average shrinkage from unchecked deliveries" figure, because we could not verify one against a primary source and an invented one would be worse than none. Your own ten deliveries are better evidence than any survey.
Choosing
Parseur free tier — under 20 documents a month. Free, and enough.
Parseur or Docsumo paid — you want hosted extraction, live integrations, and somebody else's uptime. Note you will likely still build the comparison step yourself.
Cargora — you take deliveries regularly, want the comparison and not just the extraction, are content to review on screen, and want supplier terms to stay on your own server. $49 once plus your own model usage.
Nobody — if your ten-delivery test found nothing. That is a genuinely good outcome and the correct response is to close this page.
The honest costs
Review is mandatory. Not a nicety — a reconciliation you have not eyeballed is a claim you cannot defend.
PDF plus local model is the weak combination. Anthropic, or convert to images.
No ERP integration. CSV out, then in.
And the habit. The tool only works if documents actually get put into it. Like every reconciliation control, the failure mode is not technical — it is the week everyone is busy.
Hosting. "PHP 8+ with pdo, curl, and fileinfo… MySQL and SQLite are both supported." For a concrete number from a named provider: Hetzner's own pricing — machine-read from the price API behind their pricing pages on 10 Aug 2026 — lists web-hosting plans from €1.60 to €16.72 a month and entry cloud servers from €3.99 a month (prices as returned for their German datacenters; confirm current pricing and VAT treatment at checkout). Any comparable host works — the point is that the "own" side of this comparison costs single-digit euros a month.
The short version
Document extraction is priced by volume — $39 to $499 a month, with a permanent free tier at 20 pages that suits smaller operations outright.
But extraction is the easy half. The job that recovers money is comparing the order to the delivery, and most tools leave that to you.
Before buying anything: hand-check ten recent deliveries. If you find nothing, you have saved yourself a purchase. If you find two, you now know exactly what this is worth — and that number, not a vendor's pricing page, is the one that should decide it.
Next steps
- Open the live Cargora demo — no sign-up, already signed in, resets itself
- Cargora product page and licence options
- Document extraction — work out your break-even in documents, not dollars
Vendor prices are quoted from their own pricing pages with the date read. Model running costs are not quoted as a figure — they depend on your provider and change without notice.