Integration Guide
This guide provides an overview of the typical integration points when integrating Affinda's platform. While our REST API provides powerful capabilities to maintain and manage an integration, 3 main points of integration impact the typical document journey.

1. Document Ingestion
While documents can be uploaded directly through the Affinda app or by sending email attachments to the relevant Affinda email address, most frequently customers will upload documents programmatically. Once documents are received in your existing systems (e.g. CRM, ERP, file drive, etc.), the documents are sent across programmatically to Affinda. This ensures seamless and immediate transfer of documents into Affinda for data extraction, and provides clear traceability into which documents have been sent and received.
For more information, see Document Ingestion Options or Uploading via the API.
2. Master Data for Validation (optional)
While not strictly required, providing your master source data to Affinda is a powerful way to validate the data extracted for those customers utilising the full breadth of Affinda's capabilities. Data mapping enhances data quality and accuracy by comparing extracted document data against predefined values from your internal datasets, ensuring that extracted data aligns with expected values.
When combined with Affinda's broader machine validation capabilities, this provides a powerful mechanism to validate that the information extracted from the document is valid and accurate when the values match. This can deliver high straight-through processing rates, and, in the exceptions where the document needs user validation, a picklist of acceptable values is provided for the user to choose from. confidence.
It also provides a powerful mechanism to ensure seamless integration when the data is exported from Affinda and ingested into the downstream system as the raw data can be formatted to meet the system-recognised values or codes.
Example Use Cases:
- Populating supplier picklists via API from a central accounting system and using them to validate invoices.
- Ensuring only active product SKUs (fetched from an external product database) are accepted during document processing.
- Validating that a Proof of Delivery document includes a valid order number from a live ERP system.
For more information about how to setup and configure this, see Data Mapping.
For some advanced integrations, validation results may also be provided to Affinda to surface in the user interface
In this case, customers export the data immediately after the data has been extracted, run their own validation rules in their own systems, and then feed the results back into Affinda to show in the document validation interface for users to review. We recommend discussing this type of integration with an Affinda solutions team member.
3. Data Export
Once the information in the document has been extracted and any validation occurred, the data is ready to be exported from Affinda and sent downstream. Affinda offers multiple export formats (CSV, JSON, XML) to provide easy downstream integration.
For more information, see Exporting Data.
Updated 5 days ago