What is document extraction?

Document extraction means reading documents, such as contracts, scale tickets, delivery notes and invoices, and turning the facts inside them into structured records a system can use. Google Cloud describes its version as a platform that turns "unstructured data from documents" into "structured data (specific fields, suitable for a database)". It describes the workflow as "getting the raw text from documents, then extracting specific text from that which corresponds to the data needed".

Reading and understanding

The first step is reading: turning a page image into text, which is what OCR does. The second is understanding. That means finding which text is the volume, the rate or the contract number, and how rows in a table relate. Modern extraction uses AI for both.

In a timber business

Most of the value is usually saved keying and faster payment cycles. Sometimes documents also hold facts that never reached a system in full. From Quarri's own work with a timberland manager: 140+ timber sale documents were read with every scanned page recovered, and the owner's own ledger turned out to be under-counting volume on some properties.

What makes it trustworthy

Every extracted field should be traceable to the page it came from, so anyone can check it. Figures should be checked against other records of the same thing, such as a ticket's weight against the weighbridge. Fields the model is unsure of carry a low confidence score. Those should go to a person, with the page beside them.

What it isn't

Extraction goes further than OCR, which stops at text. It isn't a document archive, which stores files without reading them. And it isn't perfect on handwriting. In a January 2026 benchmark on 10 real hand-filled forms, Businessware Technologies, a document-processing developer, found that "Even the best models rarely exceed 95% business-level accuracy".

How Quarri works explains the platform as a layer over existing systems, not a migration.

Quarri is an AI-native data platform for the timber supply chain. It connects buying, production, sales and inventory for forest management, sawmill, wood products and pulp, paper and packaging operators.