Nanonets is good at being general. That is the product. Invoices, IDs, receipts, random PDFs, train on two samples, ship JSON. If your company extracts many kinds of paper, starting with a horizontal IDP is rational. Check their site and your own reviews, not a blog’s scorecard.
Indian factory AP is not ten kinds of paper in three countries. It is GST tax invoices, often photocopies, into Tally Prime, with ITC on the line. Generality is not the constraint. A plausible-but-wrong GSTIN is the constraint. Those look valid to a model. They fail a checksum. They fail a state-vs-address check. A confidence slider does not know Maharashtra from Delhi.
What “92% confident” actually means
A model can emit a 15-character string that looks like a GSTIN. It can even emit one that happens to pass format. Checksum is a separate fact. Cross-field is a third. If you only threshold on confidence, you are saying: ship the 8% we might have invented, or park everything below 92% for a human. Either you leak errors or you drown the clerk.
EntryLedger’s export path does not use that slider as the authority. validate_invoice is the authority. GSTIN Mod-36, HSN format, arithmetic (lines → taxable → tax → total) within ±₹1, regime consistency. Fail any of those and the row is NEEDS_REVIEW with a reason code. A human sees the scan. That is slower than “approve if >90%.” It is also how you avoid posting a total that never summed.
A self-score. Not Mod-36. Not rupee closure. Not a GSTN fact.
Checksum, HSN format, arithmetic ±₹1, regime. Fail any: review. No middle that still writes Tally.
Lab scores on clean PDFs are not this job. Photocopy, 150 dpi, round-off, Indian grouping Rs. 1,00,000/-, day-first dates. If a vendor quotes a lab score, ask for the same metric on your worst 100 scans, with arithmetic closure as the pass, not fuzzy field match.
JSON vs a file Tally will swallow
Nanonets will give you JSON. Someone still has to map vendor to ledger, GST ledgers, voucher type, date format, and Tally’s import columns. That someone is you, or a SI, or a six-week project. EntryLedger’s job is the mapping ritual you already have: batch by day or vendor, CSV / XML that fits the current import. Not a new accounting UI.
If you already have engineers who love JSON and you are not on Tally, Nanonets may be the better buy. If the buyer is an accounts head who will not fund a custom mapper, JSON is not a product. It is homework.
Price at factory volume
Nanonets prices on their site and in quotes. I do not have their signed MSA. Check nanonets.com/pricing at your page count. Do not use a converted $/page from a blog as a purchase order.
EntryLedger is ₹1.40 a page, ₹1.20 after 40,000. Forty thousand pages: ₹56,000. That is on /pricing. The comparison only matters if both systems are allowed to fail closed on math. Cheap extraction of wrong totals is not cheap.
| Nanonets | EntryLedger | |
|---|---|---|
| Job | Horizontal IDP, many doc types | GST supplier invoice → Tally voucher |
| Authority on export | Confidence / your workflow rules | Validator spine (checksum, HSN, arithmetic, regime) |
| GSTIN | A field the model fills | Mod-36 + state vs address |
| Totals | Extracted numbers | Must close ±₹1 or review |
| Output | JSON / webhooks | Tally-import files, mapped |
| Residency default | Often US; ask them | We host; DPDP posture in our docs |
| When they win | Many doc types, you will build the rest | Tally + GST photocopies + a gate |
The hallucination that looks professional
Zero-shot extraction is impressive in a demo. It is also how you get a GSTIN that checksums but belongs to another entity. Same PAN family, wrong registration. Format check: pass. Checksum: maybe pass. State vs address: fail. If your pipeline never does that last check, you will post it. ITC later disagrees with 2B. Then it is a CA problem.
That is the whole product difference. Not “we have AI too.” They have more AI, on purpose. We spend the model once, then refuse to export unless the arithmetic and GST rules hold. Boring. Load-bearing.
When to pick Nanonets anyway
You extract waybills, contracts, export docs, and invoices in one flow. You have developers. Tally is not the system of record. You are fine owning validators. Buy general. Add GST checks yourself if you must.
When not to: the buyer is a factory on Tally, the input is supplier photocopies, and the fear is a wrong rupee in the books. Then a generic IDP is a component. The gate is still missing unless you write it.
Residency and who touches the scan
GST invoices are tax records. Where they sit matters to some CFOs more than model brand. Nanonets’ default story has been US cloud with other regions on request. Confirm with them. Do not take my word. EntryLedger’s posture is India-hosted, single tenant, scans not used to train a shared model. If legal has already approved a US IDP, that fight is over. If legal has not, raise it before you send a month of supplier GSTINs abroad “just to try.”
SOC 2 is not a GSTIN checksum. It is a company control report. Useful. Orthogonal. A Type II letter does not make line 4 sum to the printed total.
Bake-off, same as Clear
Same 100 ugly scans. For each row: printed total, extracted total, GSTIN, checksum pass/fail, auto vs human. Score “correct auto-export,” not “fields extracted.” If Nanonets plus your own validator wins that score at a price you like, take it. If you do not want to write the validator, that is what EntryLedger is.
Include at least one invoice where the printed GSTIN is checksum-invalid, one where lines do not sum, and one duplicate. Generic extractors often still emit a number. Watch whether that number can leave the building. That is the test. A flow builder that emails Slack on low confidence is nice. It is not the same as refusing export.
Count engineering days to Tally CSV as part of cost. Nanonets list price is not the full bill if you still need ledger mapping, Indian date parsing, and CGST vs IGST. Those days are real. We already spent them on this vertical. You should only spend them again if you want the horizontal platform for other documents too.
Indian amounts, day-first dates, HSN tables, CGST/SGST/IGST/UTGST: that is not “invoice extraction” in the generic sense. It is a dialect. Horizontal models learn English invoices well. They guess at Rs. 1,00,000/-. Guessing is what we refuse to export. If your SI will encode the dialect on top of Nanonets, budget that SI. If you will not, do not buy a platform and hope the dialect appears.
Docsumo and KlearStack sit in the same bucket as Nanonets for this buyer: generic IDP, JSON out, you build GST. Same bake-off. Same score: correct auto-export to Tally, not field F1.
If your CTO already standardised on Nanonets company-wide, do not start a religious war. Ask for a GST validator in the flow before Tally. If they will not build it, we are that step. If they will, you do not need us. Either answer is fine. Pretending extraction equals validation is not.
- Nanonets
- EntryLedger
- CGSTCGST Act
Why a wrong GSTIN is not a small extraction miss.
Are you a Nanonets alternative for everything?+
No. Only for GST invoices into Tally with a hard gate. They cover more document types.
Can I use both?+
Yes, if Nanonets feeds other docs and EntryLedger feeds AP. Do not run two GST extractors and hope they agree.
Is cheaper extraction better?+
Not if wrong totals export. Price the gate, not the API call.