Mid-Iowa Coop AI Document Processing

Summary

Mid-Iowa Cooperative handles a lot of transactions, all of which require thorough documentation. They were spending too much time on manual data entry, so they searched for custom automation to pull data from complex PDF files.

Challenge

The Mid-Iowa team was spending hours each day manually extracting data from processor settlement documents and re-typing it manually. Their existing internal system had limited AI capabilities, so they needed a custom solution that could “learn” each vendor’s document format.

Solution

Far Reach developed an AI-powered data extraction system tailored to Mid-Iowa’s settlement workflow. When Mid-Iowa uploads a settlement document PDF, the custom AI engine parses and extracts the necessary data fields and formats them in an Excel document. Mid-Iowa then uploads that spreadsheet into their ERP instead of manually typing every piece of data.

Every settlement document page includes 10 to 15 fields of data and up to 20 rows per page, resulting in hundreds of data fields. Processing these by hand was slow and tedious, and it left room for human error.

Since implementing the new system, Mid-Iowa has seen a significant reduction in manual data entry. Instead of typing information from every PDF into Excel by hand, staff now upload the PDFs and let the AI do the heavy lifting.

“It depends on a lot of factors, but we save at least a few hours per day compared to manual entry,” said Joel Benson, IT Director at Mid-Iowa Cooperative.

The system was built using Microsoft Azure AI Document Intelligence as a foundation. Each vendor has its own trained model and dedicated output folder, allowing the AI to handle multiple document types with high accuracy.

"We came to Far Reach with examples of what we needed, worked through them together, and got a great solution. The team has been knowledgeable, responsive, and easy to work with."

Joel Benson | IT Director