Extract a aged receivables report PDF to JSON
Everything below is the response the live API returned for a aged receivables report, generated when this page was built. Not a description of what it would return — the output itself, including what it scored low on.
Who this is for
Credit control, factoring and cash-flow forecasting tools reading a report the accounting system will only export as PDF.
The job, in the words people search for: “parse an aged debtors report from a PDF”.
What makes this shape awkward
Five ageing buckets across the page, most of them empty on any given row — a customer owing money in one bucket has four blank cells. This is the shape that breaks any extractor grouping rows by how many cells they contain.
The measured result
| Pages read | 1 |
| Time | 7 ms (7 ms/page) |
| Labelled fields found unprompted | 3 |
| Tables | 1 (18 rows) |
| Input | aged-receivables.pdf (31 KB — synthetic, generated from a spec in the repo; real documents of this type cannot be published) |
Fields, with a schema
Ask for the fields you want by the label printed on the page. Each answer carries the text exactly as printed (raw), the value coerced to the type you asked for, a confidence, and a bounding box you can draw on the page to check it.
curl -X POST https://api.pdfcraft.dev/v1/extract \
-H "Authorization: Bearer $PDFCRAFT_API_KEY" \
-H "Content-Type: application/json" \
-d '{
"file": "<base64 of your aged receivables report>",
"schema": {
"as_at": "date",
"total_outstanding": "currency"
}
}'What came back
| Field | raw | value | confidence |
|---|---|---|---|
as_at | 2026-03-31 | "2026-03-31" | 70% |
total_outstanding | GBP 184,402.18 | 184402.18 GBP | 70% |
Every label it found without being asked
Send no schema and you get all of these, keyed by the label as printed. Useful for discovering what a new supplier’s layout actually contains before you write a schema against it.
As At, Currency, Total Outstanding
Tables
Customer · Current · 1-30 · 31-60 · 61-90 · 90+ · 18 rows × 6 columns · page 1
Table confidence 70%. Header confidence 60% — the first row was promoted out of the data.
| Customer | Current | 1-30 | 31-60 | 61-90 | 90+ |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Meridian Foods | — | 8,973.00 | — | — | — |
| Caldera Print | — | — | — | 3,439.00 | — |
| Orbit Logistics | — | — | — | 3,077.00 | — |
First 3 of 18 rows.
With options.rows_as_objects, the same row keyed by its header:
{
"Customer": "Meridian Foods",
"Current": "",
"1-30": "8,973.00",
"31-60": "",
"61-90": "",
"90+": ""
}What this does not do
- No OCR. This reads the PDF’s text layer. A scanned or photographed aged receivables report has no text layer and returns
422 extraction_failedwith the page numbers that were blank — deliberately, and quickly, so you can route it somewhere that does OCR rather than waiting on a guess. - No model. Run the same file twice and you get the same bytes back. That is the trade: it cannot infer a field that is not printed, and it cannot hallucinate one either.
- Ambiguity is reported, not resolved. A date like 03/04/2026 stays a string, and a bare
$returns a null currency, because guessing wrong on either is not something you can recover from downstream.
Try it on your own aged receivables report
The playground takes a file and shows the same JSON, with every bounding box drawn over the page. No key and no signup for the first few; a free key gives you 100 pages a month.