An operations manager at a factoring company processing 35,000 invoice schedules per year described her team’s experience with Formstorm in two sentences:
“Formstorm like reads fives as S. It just doesn’t read correctly.”
That’s the core problem. Formstorm is one of the few OCR tools built specifically for the factoring industry, and it handles basic invoice schedules adequately when the documents are clean and short. But factoring companies don’t process clean, short documents. They process thousands of multi-page schedules from hundreds of clients, each containing dozens or hundreds of individual invoices. And Formstorm breaks down exactly where factoring companies need it most.
If you’re running a factoring operation and evaluating Formstorm alternatives, here’s what goes wrong, what to look for in a replacement, and what accurate extraction actually looks like at factoring scale.
Lido is the best Formstorm alternative for factoring companies processing high-volume invoice schedules. It extracts data from any invoice format — including multi-page schedules, scanned documents, and handwritten notes — without templates or page limits. Factoring teams using Lido eliminate the character confusion errors and 150-page ceiling that force manual rework in Formstorm.
Formstorm’s limitations are structural. They don’t surface during a demo with a clean 5-page PDF. They surface when your team is processing 700,000 pages per year from 400 clients, each sending documents in different formats and quality levels.
Character confusion is the most damaging issue. When Formstorm reads a “5” as an “S” on an invoice amount, your team has to catch it manually or it flows into your ERP as incorrect data. For a factoring company where every dollar amount matters — where you’re advancing funds based on invoice values — OCR errors aren’t just inconvenient. They’re a financial risk.
The operations manager described the result: “There’s a lot of manual that’s done.” Her team was spending 30 seconds to a minute per invoice correcting Formstorm’s output. Across 35,000 schedules per year, that manual correction time adds up to thousands of hours.
This is the issue that forces the biggest operational workaround. “Anything over 150 pages in Formstorm, there’s such a lag when you’re turning the page to verify the data,” the operations manager explained. “We don’t put anything over 150 pages in Formstorm.”
For a factoring company, invoice schedules regularly exceed 150 pages. A single client might submit a schedule containing 300 invoices with backup documentation — bills of lading, remittances, proof of delivery. When Formstorm can’t handle these documents, the team falls back to manual data entry.
The numbers tell the story: in one year, this factoring company processed 31,000 schedules through Formstorm. The remaining 3,000 — the ones over 150 pages — were keyed entirely by hand in their ERP. That’s 3,000 schedules of pure manual data entry because the OCR tool couldn’t keep up.
Factoring companies receive multi-invoice schedules as single PDF files. Each schedule contains multiple invoices that need to be split, labeled by invoice number, and processed individually. Formstorm requires custom coding to handle this splitting and labeling. For operations teams without development resources, this means either paying for custom work or handling it manually.
Factoring document processing has specific requirements that generic OCR tools miss:
When the factoring company tested Lido against their actual documents, the operations manager saw the difference immediately: “We got 100% accuracy. The total invoice amount is exactly matching up with the total.”
She also noticed the speed:
“The extraction time is even way faster than the OCR system in Formstorm trying to read each page for the data. It’s a major difference.”
Looking for a broader comparison? See our best Formstorm alternatives roundup covering 6 tools. Also evaluating template-based tools? Read our Docparser alternatives guide.
Consider the factoring company’s numbers: 35,000 schedules per year, with 3,000 keyed manually because Formstorm couldn’t handle them, and the remaining 31,000 requiring manual correction for OCR errors. That’s manual labor on every single schedule.
With Lido processing all 35,000 schedules automatically at 100% accuracy and no page limits, the operations team reclaims thousands of hours per year. The company avoids adding headcount as client volume grows. And the financial risk from OCR errors on invoice amounts drops to near zero.
Lido’s pricing is transparent: $29 per month for 100 pages, $7,000 per year for 42,000 pages, and enterprise plans from $30,000 per year for high-volume operations. Start with 50 free pages — no credit card required — and test with your actual invoice schedules, including the long ones Formstorm can’t handle.
Lido is the strongest Formstorm alternative for factoring companies because it delivers 100% accuracy on invoice amounts, handles documents over 500 pages without performance degradation, and splits multi-invoice schedules automatically. A factoring company processing 35,000 schedules per year was manually keying 3,000 schedules because Formstorm could not handle files over 150 pages. Lido processes the full range without page limits or the character confusion errors that Formstorm produces.
Factoring companies switch from Formstorm because of three structural limitations: OCR accuracy errors where characters like “5” are read as “S” on financial documents, severe performance degradation on documents over 150 pages that forces manual data entry, and lack of intelligent document splitting for multi-invoice schedules. These issues create thousands of hours of manual correction work annually and introduce financial risk from incorrect invoice amounts.
Yes. Lido processes documents over 500 pages without lag, slowdowns, or performance degradation. Formstorm becomes unusable above 150 pages, forcing factoring teams to key long schedules manually. Lido handles the full range of document lengths through the same automated pipeline, eliminating the page-count workaround that costs factoring operations thousands of hours per year.
Lido achieves 99.5% to 100% accuracy on typed invoice documents. Formstorm has documented character confusion issues where numbers are misread as letters, requiring manual verification on every extracted amount. A factoring company testing Lido reported 100% accuracy with invoice totals matching exactly, compared to the constant manual correction required with Formstorm’s output.
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