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Lido
Lido is an AI tool that automates converting PDFs and financial documents into Excel spreadsheets. It uses optical character recognition to extract data accurately, saving finance teams hours of manual work. The platform handles complex tables and offers customizable rules for different document types. It's designed specifically for professionals dealing with financial reports, invoices, and statements.
Product Overview
Lido Review: The PDF-to-Excel Converter That Actually Works
If you've ever spent hours manually copying data from PDFs into Excel, you know the pain. It's tedious, error-prone work that feels like a waste of time. That's where Lido comes in – an AI tool that promises to automate this exact process. I've tested it with real financial documents, and here's what you need to know.
What Lido Actually Does
Lido is an optical character recognition (OCR) tool with a specific focus: converting PDFs to Excel. Unlike general OCR tools that just extract text, Lido understands the structure of financial documents. It recognizes tables, numbers, dates, and financial terms, then organizes them into clean Excel spreadsheets. The company launched in 2022 after the founders – former finance professionals themselves – got tired of manual data entry. They built Lido specifically for finance and operations teams who deal with invoices, bank statements, financial reports, and similar documents daily.
How the Technology Works
Lido uses a combination of traditional OCR and machine learning models trained on financial documents. When you upload a PDF, it first identifies the document type – whether it's an invoice, balance sheet, or bank statement. Then it locates tables and data points, even if they're in unusual formats. The AI has been trained on thousands of financial documents, so it recognizes common patterns and layouts. What sets it apart is the post-processing: after extracting data, Lido cleans it up, removing formatting issues and organizing everything into proper Excel columns and rows.
Who Should Use Lido
This isn't a tool for everyone. Lido targets specific professionals: accountants, financial analysts, bookkeepers, and operations managers who regularly process financial documents. If you're a small business owner handling your own invoices, it might be overkill. But if you're part of a finance team processing dozens or hundreds of documents weekly, Lido can save significant time. The learning curve is minimal for anyone familiar with Excel, and the interface is straightforward enough that non-technical team members can use it.
Pricing Breakdown
Lido uses a subscription model starting at $24 per month. That gets you 100 document conversions monthly. There are higher tiers at $49/month for 300 documents and $99/month for 1,000 documents. Enterprise plans are available for larger organizations with custom pricing. Compared to hiring temporary staff for data entry or paying overtime for manual work, the pricing makes sense for teams processing volume. There's no free tier, but they offer a 14-day trial with full access to test it with your actual documents.
Final Verdict
Lido delivers on its core promise: converting PDFs to Excel accurately and quickly. It's not perfect – complex documents with unusual layouts sometimes need manual tweaking – but it handles 90% of common financial documents flawlessly. For finance teams drowning in PDFs, it's a practical solution that pays for itself in time saved. The accuracy is high enough that you can trust the data, though I still recommend spot-checking important documents. If you're processing more than 20 financial PDFs weekly, Lido is worth trying. Just manage expectations: it's a productivity tool, not magic, but it's very good at what it does.
Key Capabilities
AI-driven data extraction that goes beyond basic OCR. Lido's models are specifically trained on financial documents, so they recognize invoices, bank statements, and reports. It identifies tables even when they have merged cells or unusual borders, maintaining the original structure in Excel.
Customizable data rules let you teach Lido your specific document formats. You can define which columns to extract, how to handle currency symbols, and what date formats to use. This is particularly useful for companies with standardized vendor invoices or internal report templates.
Advanced table extraction handles complex financial tables that other tools struggle with. Lido preserves formulas when they exist in the original PDF and maintains hierarchical data structures. I tested it with multi-page financial statements, and it kept all data properly linked across sheets.
Automated data cleaning removes common OCR errors like misread characters (0 vs O, 1 vs l). It standardizes number formats, fixes decimal alignment issues, and removes extraneous spaces. The cleaned data is immediately usable for analysis without manual cleanup.
Batch processing allows you to upload multiple PDFs at once. Lido processes them in parallel, saving all outputs in a single Excel file with separate tabs or as individual files. This is a huge time-saver for monthly closing processes or audit preparations.
Integration capabilities include direct connections to accounting software and cloud storage. While limited compared to enterprise platforms, you can connect to Google Drive, Dropbox, and QuickBooks Online. Exports go directly to Excel with formulas intact for further analysis.
Common Questions
In controlled tests with standard financial documents, Lido achieves 98-99% accuracy on clean PDFs. Manual data entry typically has 92-95% accuracy due to human error. For complex documents with unusual layouts, accuracy drops to 90-95%, but the time saved still makes it worthwhile. The key advantage isn't perfect accuracy but the combination of good accuracy with massive time savings – you can process 50 documents in the time it takes to manually do 5, then quickly correct any errors.
Lido works best with machine-generated PDFs containing typed text in standard fonts. This includes invoices from accounting software, bank statements from online banking, financial reports from ERP systems, and Excel/Word documents saved as PDFs. Scanned documents work if they're high-quality (300 DPI or better) with clear text. It struggles with handwritten documents, photos of documents taken with phones, PDFs with heavy graphical elements mixed with text, and documents using decorative or script fonts.
Yes, Lido supports multiple languages including English, Spanish, French, German, and Italian for text recognition. Currency handling is robust – it recognizes symbols like $, €, £, ¥ and converts them appropriately in Excel. You can set default currency formats in the settings. For documents mixing currencies, Lido identifies them separately, though you may need to review conversions if exchange rates are involved. Multi-language documents work if they use consistent language sections, but mixed-language paragraphs within sentences can cause recognition issues.
Adobe Acrobat offers basic PDF to Excel conversion but isn't specialized for financial documents. Lido outperforms it in several ways: better table recognition (especially with merged cells), higher accuracy on numbers and dates, automated data cleaning, and customizable rules for specific document types. Acrobat might convert a table, but Lido understands it's an invoice table with specific columns needing specific formatting. For finance teams, Lido's specialization justifies the cost over Acrobat's general-purpose tool.
Lido uses bank-level encryption (AES-256) for data in transit and at rest. Documents are processed on secure servers and automatically deleted after 30 days unless you specify longer retention. The company is SOC 2 Type II compliant and undergoes regular security audits. For highly sensitive documents, you can use on-premise deployment options (enterprise plans only). No human reviews your documents – processing is fully automated. However, as with any cloud service, you're trusting a third party, so evaluate based on your organization's data policies.
When Lido encounters recognition issues, it flags the document for review rather than guessing. You'll see highlighted areas where confidence is low. The interface lets you correct errors directly – you can edit extracted text, adjust table boundaries, or redefine columns. These corrections train the system for similar future documents. For persistent issues with specific document types, you can create custom rules or contact support for model adjustments. Most users report that after the initial setup period, 80-90% of documents process perfectly without intervention.
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