How to Choose the Right Preset for Your Document Type | Tablola Guide

You upload a document, hit extract, and get back a spreadsheet full of merged cells, missing columns, or garbled numbers. Sound familiar? The culprit is almost always the same: using a generic extraction method when a purpose-built preset would have done the job in seconds.

Tablola's preset system exists precisely to solve this. Each preset is pre-configured for a specific document structure — invoices, bank statements, delivery notes, receipts, and more. The catch is knowing which preset fits which document. This guide walks you through that decision, step by step.

Step 1: Identify What Kind of Document You Actually Have

Before you open Tablola, take ten seconds to classify your document. Most business documents fall into one of four categories:

Financial records — invoices, receipts, purchase orders, bank statements
Logistics documents — delivery notes, shipping manifests, packing lists
Scanned or image-based files — photographed receipts, scanner output PDFs, JPGs of tables
Generic tabular data — reports, exports, or any PDF that simply contains a table

This single classification decision eliminates most wrong turns. A bank statement and an invoice might look similar at a glance, but their data structures are completely different — and a preset tuned for one will produce poor results on the other.

Step 2: Match the Document to a Preset

Once you know your document type, the right preset becomes obvious. Here is a practical mapping:

Invoices

Invoices have line items, tax fields, totals, and vendor metadata. Use the Invoice to Excel preset to pull all of that into structured columns automatically. If you work with Turkish-format invoices, the Fatura Verisini Excel'e Aktarma preset handles local field conventions.

Bank Statements

Statements are date-ordered transaction lists with debit/credit columns. The Bank Statement to Excel or CSV preset is built specifically for this layout — it preserves transaction order and correctly separates amounts from running balances, which a generic table extractor often collapses into one column.

Delivery Notes & Purchase Orders

These documents share a similar structure — item codes, quantities, unit prices — but serve different purposes. Use the Delivery Note to Excel preset for shipping documents, and the Purchase Order to Excel preset for procurement records. Mixing these up is a common mistake that leads to misaligned quantity and price columns.

Scanned PDFs and Receipt Photos

This is where most generic tools fail completely. If your file came from a scanner or a phone camera, you need OCR-aware extraction. The Scanned PDF to Excel preset and the Receipt Photos to Excel preset are optimised for low-resolution, skewed, or partially blurred source files.

General Tables in PDFs or Images

If your document doesn't fit a specific business type but simply contains a table, use the PDF to Excel converter preset or the Image to Excel converter preset for image files. These are flexible general-purpose options — but always prefer a specific preset over a general one when one exists.

Step 3: Consider Whether You're Processing One File or Many

Single-document extraction and bulk extraction are different workflows. If you have a folder of invoices, statements, or delivery notes, extracting them one by one wastes time and introduces inconsistency.

For bulk work, the Merge Multiple Documents into One Table preset lets you feed in several files and receive a single unified spreadsheet — with consistent columns across all source documents. This is especially useful for month-end reconciliation or batch supplier invoice processing.

Step 4: Review the Output Before You Commit

Even with the right preset, always do a quick sanity check on the extracted data:

Are column headers meaningful and consistent?
Do numeric values match what you see in the source document?
Are dates formatted uniformly?
Are any rows duplicated or missing?

If something looks off, the most common fix is simply switching to a more specific preset. A generic table extractor applied to an invoice, for example, will often miss the header row or merge the tax line into the subtotal.

Step 5: Use Tablola's AI Editor to Clean What's Left

No extraction is perfect 100% of the time. After running your preset, Tablola's built-in AI spreadsheet editor lets you clean up remaining issues without leaving the tool. You can rename columns, reformat dates, remove blank rows, or split combined fields — all by describing what you need in plain language.

Think of presets as doing 90% of the work instantly, and the AI editor as the final 10% that makes the data truly usable.

A Final Word on Picking the Right Tool for the Job

The difference between a frustrating extraction experience and a smooth one is almost never about the quality of the source document — it's about preset selection. Take a moment to classify your document before you upload, choose the most specific preset available, and lean on the AI editor for any final adjustments. That habit alone will save you significant time across every document workflow you run.

If you're regularly working with the same document type, bookmark the relevant preset directly. The fewer clicks between you and clean data, the better.