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 rate limits you can plan around 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.
One Endpoint, One Response
Extraction is a single synchronous call. You POST /api/v1/extract with the file and your X-API-Key header, and the structured JSON comes back in the same response — text, confidence score, OCR engine metadata, and optionally PII detection results and word-level bounding boxes. Responses return within 30 seconds, so your integration needs no job store, no polling loop, and no callback endpoint to get started.
Generate keys under Settings → API keys on a Business or Enterprise plan. Create one key per integration — they revoke independently, so rotating your CLM connector never takes the ERP down with it.
Rate Limits
Each key is capped at 100 requests per day, counted only on success — a failed call doesn't eat your quota. The dashboard shows requests-today against the limit for every key. Keys also carry a daily premium-OCR budget; past it, extraction transparently falls back to the local engine rather than failing your pipeline. Enterprise volumes are negotiated against your profile.
Signed Event Webhooks
For work that finishes outside a request — bulk batches especially — ScanThisText can push events to an HTTPS endpoint you control: scan.completed, scan.failed, batch.completed, batch.failed, and pii.detected.
Every delivery carries an X-Webhook-Signature header holding an HMAC-SHA256 digest of the raw body, computed with a secret only your tenant knows. Recompute it and compare before you trust the payload. Failed deliveries retry with exponential backoff, and every attempt is recorded so you can see what landed and what didn't. Event webhooks aren't self-serve yet — we configure the registration with you during onboarding.
The No-Code Path: Zapier
If you'd rather not write a consumer, connect a Zapier webhook under Integrations and every processed invoice gets posted to the URL you supply. From there Zapier fans it out to Salesforce, HubSpot, Google Sheets, or anywhere else — no code, and no endpoint of your own to keep online. Team workspaces also push invoices straight into QuickBooks Online as Bills with the original PDF attached, which covers the most common destination outright.
What You Can Automate
- AP intake: Invoice lands in a shared mailbox → submitted to ScanThisText → structured data posted to your ERP, or pushed to QuickBooks as a Bill.
- Contract ingestion: Counterparty uploads to your CLM → extraction runs → key dates, parties, and governing law land in the reviewer's queue.
- Customer onboarding: ID photo uploaded via your app → ScanThisText extracts the fields → CRM record populated before the user sees the next screen.
- Bulk backfill: Point a batch at an archive and take a
batch.completedwebhook when the run finishes.
Observability for the Ops Team
The audit log records account activity with timestamp, actor, and outcome, and webhook deliveries are stored per attempt with their response status. Both are available on Business and Enterprise plans, so an integration failure is something you can point at rather than reconstruct.
Start With a Spike
Teams typically prove value with a two-week spike: a Business plan, a key from the dashboard, 50 real documents through the API, and a side-by-side against the current manual process. Start on Business to generate your first key, or talk to us if you need event webhooks or Enterprise volumes wired up.
