README.md

Invoice Data Extractor

A comprehensive pipeline for creating specialized AI models to extract structured data from invoices and receipts using Prem Studio - an end-to-end platform for building custom Language Models.

Project Overview

This project demonstrates the complete workflow of creating a custom small language model for invoice data extraction, showcasing the capabilities of Prem Studio's no-code AI fine-tuning platform. Instead of relying on expensive general-purpose models like Claude or GPT-4, we create a specialized, cost-effective model that excels at extracting specific information from invoices and receipts.

What We Extract

• DateTime: Transaction date and time
• Total Amount: Final transaction amount
• Currency: Currency code (USD, EUR, CAD, etc.)
• Business Name: Name of the merchant/business
• Business Location: City, state/province, country

Project Architecture

Invoice PDFs → Markdown Conversion → Dataset Creation → Model Fine-tuning → Deployment
     (1)              (2)                  (3)                (4)              (5)

Project Structure

InvoiceDataExtractor/
├── dataset/
│   ├── originalData/         # Raw PDF invoices and receipts
│   └── mdData/               # Converted markdown files
├── pdfToMd/
│   └── main.py              # PDF to Markdown converter
├── createJsonlDataset/
│   ├── index.ts             # Dataset generator script
│   ├── invoiceDataset.jsonl # Generated training dataset
│   └── package.json         # Dependencies
└── README.md

Getting Started

Prerequisites

• Python 3.8+ (for PDF conversion)
• Bun (for dataset generation)
• Prem Studio account (for model fine-tuning)

Installation

1. Clone the repository

   git clone https://github.com/yourusername/InvoiceDataExtractor.git
   cd InvoiceDataExtractor

2. Install Python dependencies

   cd pdfToMd
   pip install markitdown pathlib

3. Install Node.js dependencies

   cd createJsonlDataset
   bun install

4. Set up Prem AI API Key

   export PREMAI_API_KEY="your-premai-api-key"

Step-by-Step Pipeline

Step 1: PDF to Markdown Conversion

Convert raw PDF invoices to clean, structured markdown format using the pdfToMd/main.py script.

cd pdfToMd
python main.py

What it does:

• Processes PDF files from dataset/originalData/
• Converts each PDF to markdown using MarkItDown
• Sanitizes text to remove problematic Unicode characters
• Saves clean markdown files to dataset/mdData/

Key Features:

• Handles multilingual invoices
• Removes control characters that could break JSON processing
• Preserves important formatting and structure

Step 2: Dataset Creation

Generate a conversational training dataset in JSONL format using the createJsonlDataset/index.ts script.

cd createJsonlDataset
bun run start

What it does:

• Reads all markdown files from dataset/mdData/
• Uses Claude-4-Sonnet via Prem AI to extract structured data
• Creates conversation pairs (user input → assistant response)
• Saves training data in JSONL format for fine-tuning

Output Format: Each line in invoiceDataset.jsonl contains a conversation:

{
  "messages": [
    {
      "role": "system",
      "content": "You are a helpful assistant that can extract information from invoices..."
    },
    {
      "role": "user", 
      "content": "(original: invoice.pdf markdown: invoice.md) [markdown content]"
    },
    {
      "role": "assistant",
      "content": "{\"datetime\": \"2024-01-01 12:00:00\", \"total_amount\": 25.99, \"currency\": \"USD\", \"business_name\": \"Coffee Shop\", \"business_location\": \"New York, NY, USA\"}"
    }
  ]
}

Step 3: Model Fine-tuning with Prem Studio

Upload your invoiceDataset.jsonl to Prem Studio, select a base model, and start training. The platform automatically handles hyperparameter optimization and provides real-time training metrics.

Step 4: Deployment

Your fine-tuned model is automatically deployed to secure endpoints with instant SDK access.

Model Evaluation Results

After fine-tuning, we evaluated our custom model against base models and closed-source alternatives. The results show that our specialized invoice extraction model performs competitively with larger general-purpose models:

Key Findings:

• Claude-4-Sonnet: 90% average correctness (baseline)
• Fine-tuned Llama 3.2-3B: 82% average correctness
• GPT-4o: 79% average correctness
• Base Llama 3.2-3B: 72% average correctness
• Qwen 2.5-7B: 75% average correctness

The fine-tuned model demonstrates significant improvement over its base version and competitive performance with larger models, while being much more cost-effective and faster for deployment.

Use Cases

This pipeline can be adapted for various document extraction tasks:

• Financial Services: Process expense reports, bank statements
• Healthcare: Extract data from medical bills, insurance claims
• Legal: Parse contracts, billing statements
• Retail: Process purchase orders, delivery receipts
• Travel: Extract booking confirmations, travel expenses

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Built to showcase the power of specialized AI models created with Prem Studio