AI & Automation
What is Unstructured Data?
Unstructured data is information that doesn't conform to a predefined data model or schema — including PDFs, Word documents, emails, scanned images, and free-form text.
Explanation
The majority of accounting data arrives as unstructured: supplier invoices are PDFs, bank statements are exported files, contracts are Word documents. Traditional accounting software handles structured data well (transactions already in the system) but struggles with unstructured inputs. Converting unstructured data to structured data is the first step in any document automation workflow. This is where AI has made the biggest impact in accounting — modern document AI can extract structured fields from virtually any document format, handling the variation in layout, language, and quality that manual processing has historically absorbed.
How Rima relates
Rima is built to handle unstructured accounting documents — PDFs, scanned statements, email attachments — and convert them into structured, ERP-ready data automatically.
Learn about AI document processingRelated Terms
Structured Data Extraction
The process of pulling specific, organized fields from unstructured documents like PDFs or emails.
OCR (Optical Character Recognition)
Technology that converts scanned documents and images into machine-readable text.
AI Document Processing
Using artificial intelligence to automatically extract, classify, and process data from documents.
See it in action
Rima automates the manual document workflows accounting teams spend hours on every week.