What questions should I ask when evaluating document automation vendors?

Direct answer

A vendor evaluation should focus on whether the product can run your real workflow, not just whether it can extract data from a clean demo PDF.

The best questions uncover how the system handles changing formats, long documents, narrative text, optional fields, mixed document types, review, validation, and downstream loading.

Questions to ask

Ask how documents can be ingested from email, SFTP, shared folders, APIs, or uploads; how document types are classified; and how many different sender formats can be supported without template sprawl.

Ask what happens when a field is missing, how false positives are caught, whether expected data types can be enforced, how exceptions are reviewed, and how approved data is exported to the system of record.

How Lido helps

Lido is designed around matching the customer's workflow: intake, classification, AI extraction, spreadsheet-style review, validation, and downstream automation.

That makes it easier to evaluate the software against the actual process your operations team runs every day.

Example workflow

1. Bring real documents from multiple senders and formats to the evaluation.
2. Ask vendors to explain intake, classification, extraction, validation, review, and export together.
3. Test missing fields, long documents, changed layouts, and downstream import requirements.
4. Compare how much ongoing configuration your team will need to maintain.