At 50 documents a day, a browser upload works fine. At 500, your AP clerk is the bottleneck. At 5,000, you need machines talking to machines — with retries, idempotency, and an audit trail that survives a compliance review.
Why the API Exists
The ScanThisText REST API is the same pipeline the web app uses, exposed for systems integration. ERPs submit invoices the moment they hit the AP inbox. CLMs push contracts as soon as they're uploaded to SharePoint. Intake forms send scanned IDs inline. Every one of those flows shares the same requirement: extract structured data without a human in the loop.
The Two-Phase Pattern
Document extraction takes seconds to minutes depending on page count and enrichment depth. Rather than holding an HTTP connection open, the API uses a two-phase pattern:
- Submit: POST the document, get back a job ID immediately.
- Receive: ScanThisText fires a signed webhook to your endpoint when extraction completes, carrying the structured JSON payload.
No polling, no dropped connections, no lambdas waiting around. Your integration just needs one public HTTPS endpoint that validates the signature and persists the payload.
Signed Webhooks, Not Hope
Every webhook is signed with an HMAC-SHA256 signature over the raw body using a secret only your tenant knows. Verify the signature before trusting the payload. Replay attacks are mitigated by a timestamp header — reject anything older than 5 minutes.
What You Can Automate
- AP intake: Invoice lands in a shared mailbox → forwarded to ScanThisText → structured data posted to your ERP with GL code suggestions and duplicate detection.
- Contract ingestion: Counterparty uploads to your CLM → webhook triggers extraction → risk-scored clauses appear in the reviewer's queue.
- Customer onboarding: ID photo uploaded via your mobile app → ScanThisText extracts fields and validates checksums → CRM record populated before the user sees the next screen.
- Claims processing: EOBs and medical records flow in → PHI-redacted structured data routes to adjusters while identified copy stays in the vault.
Rate Limits & Idempotency
The Business tier includes 100 requests/day; Enterprise scales to custom limits negotiated against your volume profile. Every submission accepts an idempotency key so retries don't duplicate work — critical when your orchestrator replays a failed step.
Observability for the Ops Team
The audit log captures every API call with timestamp, tenant, user or service account, document hash, extraction result, and webhook delivery status. Failed deliveries retry with exponential backoff and land in a dead-letter queue your team can inspect.
Start With a Spike
Enterprise customers typically prove value with a 2-week spike: 50 real documents through the API, a single webhook consumer in a staging environment, side-by-side comparison against the current manual process. No procurement, no contract, just a trial key. Request API credentials and we'll get you an integration-ready sandbox within a business day.