GLOBAL EXPANSION

Globalization in a box

Parsing multilingual and multicurrency documents without barriers

TL;DR

  • Foreign expansion often paralyzes accounting traditional template-based OCR cannot cope with the variety of languages and formats.
  • Modern NLP (Natural Language Processing) understands the semantic context of the document, regardless of the language (even Chinese or Arabic).
  • Data normalization is key: the system automatically converts different formats for writing numbers (dots vs. commas) and currencies to an ERP-safe standard.

Every Expansion Director knows the scenario. We open the champagne because we just signed a strategic contract in the Middle East or China. Sales take off, the columns in Excel rise. But a month later, there is paralysis in the accounting department in Warsaw.

Suddenly, documents that no one can read enter the orderly world of invoices. Welcome to the corporateTower of Babel.

Commercial success in a new market often means an operational nightmare in the back-office. Our accountants are great specialists, but we can't require them to be fluent in Mandarin or Arabic. The traditional approach was to hire local accounting firms or armies of translators. Today that approach is archaic. Modern document parsing technology, such as Dokum, acts like "globalization in a box" - removing language barriers before the data hits the ERP.

Tower of Babel in your ERP system - why traditional OCR can't handle globalization?

For years, the foundation of digitization was OCR (Optical Character Recognition). It worked great within a single country. But with global expansion, traditional template-based OCR is becoming a crutch.

Why? Because the "old" OCR is blind to meaning. It only sees the X and Y coordinates.

  • In order to understand an invoice from Germany, you need to point out to him:"in this corner is the Gesamtbetrag".
  • To understand the invoice from France, you need to create a new template for the field Montant Total.

When serving 20 markets, maintaining thousands of templates becomes impossible. This is where the paradigm shift comes in. We are moving from OCR toNLP (Natural Language Processing) and LLM models. A modern IDP system "understands" a document just like a human polyglot. It doesn't look for coordinates, it looks for semantic context. He knows that "Total", "Total" and "Icmali" (Turkish) are the same amount to be paid.

Period, comma and rate of the day - pitfalls of financial data normalization

The real killer of cross-border payments processes is numerical formatting. In the financial world, a small punctuation mark has a gigantic impact.

Imagine an invoice for the amount of 100,500 (one hundred thousand five hundred):

  • USA: 100,500.00
  • Germany: 100.500,00
  • France: 100 500,00

For an ERP database, the difference is critical. If the system interprets the German dot as a decimal separator, instead of an invoice for one hundred thousand, you will post an invoice for one hundred units.

Conceptual 3D illustration labeled 'Globalization in a Box' showing a glowing AI cube processing floating multilingual documents and currency symbols into structured global data streams


This is where the Data Normalization. Dokum analyzes Locale (regional settings). It recognizes that the invoice is from Berlin, so the dot acts as a thousands separator. It then converts this number to a standardized machine-safe format for your SAP. What's more, the system automatically normalizes ISO 4217 currency codes - it converts "€", "$" symbols into EUR, USD codes.

Case Study: How to serve 15 markets with one accounting team?

Let's look at a retail company entering the CEE and DACH markets.

Pre-implementation situation: Invoices from Germany are handled by an expensive team with German. Invoices from Hungary go to local offices ("black boxes"). Each market is a separate data silo.

Transformation from Dokum: The company implements a central entry point. German, Hungarian and Polish invoices go into the same "box." AI recognizes the language and translates key fields into a universal "data language." An accountant in Warsaw sees the structured record and knows that the Hungarian "Fizetendő" means "To be paid."

Effect: A company can enter the Bulgarian market tomorrow without recruiting a single Bulgarian accountant. The administrative barrier drops to zero.

Multi-language Support in Practice: Does AI understand Chinese and Emirati invoices?

The biggest test is non-Latin languages. Can the system handle an invoice from Shanghai or Dubai? For LLM models, this is not a problem.

  • China: The system distinguishes between the amount written in Arabic numerals and traditional numeric characters.
  • MENA (Middle East): It copes with mixed text layout (Arabic from the right, numbers from the left).

You don't need to install a "China plug-in." The intelligence is built into the core of the system. You avoid costly interpretation errors and fraud.

Completion: technology removes administrative boundaries

For the Expansion Manager, the conclusion is one: language barriers in the back-office have become a technological problem that has a ready solution. The investment in Dokum is an investment in agility.

Instead of building walls of translators, you build a highway for data. In modern business, your accounting should be as global as your sales.

Find out if your company is ready for barrier-free globalization. Send us a sample of documents from your most difficult market and see how we turn "incomprehensible characters" into structured data ready for posting in seconds.