refractr

n8n node for Refractr: extract typed fields from invoices, delivery notes and other documents, with a confidence score per field to route doubtful results to review.

Package Information

Released: this month
Downloads: 0 weekly / 0 monthly
Latest Version: 0.1.1
Author: Sepp Beld

Available Nodes

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Refractr
Extract typed fields from invoices, delivery notes and other documents, with a confidence score per field

Documentation

n8n-nodes-refractr

This is an n8n community node for Refractr, a document extraction API. Give it an invoice, delivery note, bill of lading or any other document, as a file, scan or text, plus the fields you want, and it returns typed values with a confidence score per field. A field that isn't in the document comes back as null, never made up.

The node sends results it's confident about to one output and doubtful ones to a Needs Review output, so only those go to a person.

n8n is a fair-code licensed workflow automation platform.

Installation · Operations · Credentials · Usage · Compatibility · Resources

Installation

Follow the installation guide in the n8n community nodes documentation, and install n8n-nodes-refractr.

Operations

Extraction

  • Extract: extract fields from a file (PDF, Word, OpenDocument, or a scan or photo) or from text.
  • Get Job: get the result of an extraction by its job ID.

Account

  • Get Credit Balance: the current balance plus lifetime purchased and used totals.
  • Get Usage: daily request and credit totals over the last N days.

Credentials

  1. Sign up and confirm your email address. Keys only work after that.
  2. Create an API key in your dashboard.
  3. In n8n, create a Refractr API credential and paste the key. Leave Base URL as it is.

Every account gets 100 free extractions per day.

Usage

Defining the fields

Add each field with a name and a type: String, Number, Integer, Boolean, Date, or a list of one of those. Descriptive names work best (invoice_date beats d1). Use dots to nest fields, such as vendor.name and vendor.vat_number.

For lists of objects, such as invoice line items, set Schema Definition to Using JSON Template and write a Refractr template:

{
  "invoice_number": "__str__",
  "total_amount": "__float__",
  "line_items": [{ "description": "__str__", "amount": "__float__" }]
}

Dates always come back as YYYY-MM-DD, and amounts as bare numbers (1249.0, not "EUR 1,249.00").

Scans and photos (OCR)

With OCR set to Auto, images are read with OCR. Other files are read from their text layer first, and retried with OCR only when they have none, such as scanned PDFs. The first attempt on a scan fails without being charged, so you only pay for OCR (2 credits instead of 1) when it's needed. Choose Always for PDFs that mix text and scanned pages.

Routing by confidence

With Route by Confidence on, the node has two outputs:

  • Confident: every scored field is at or above the Confidence Threshold (default 0.9).
  • Needs Review: at least one field scored below it, a field listed under Options > Fields That Must Have a Value is empty, or the extraction failed while On Error is set to continue.

The input file is passed through on both outputs, so a reviewer can open the document. A typical workflow sends the Confident output to your accounting system or a spreadsheet, and Needs Review to Slack, email or a review sheet with reviewReasons in the message.

Fields Refractr doesn't score, such as judgment fields (sentiment, category, is_… flags) and text longer than eight words, are ignored when routing.

Output

With Simplify on, each item looks like this:

{
  "data": { "invoice_number": "VV-26-0412", "total": 1756.92, "po_number": null },
  "confidence": { "invoice_number": 0.9612, "total": 0.71, "po_number": 0.98 },
  "needsReview": true,
  "reviewReasons": ["total: confidence 0.71 is below 0.9"],
  "lowConfidenceFields": ["total"],
  "jobId": "550e8400-e29b-41d4-a716-446655440000",
  "creditsCharged": 1
}

Turn Simplify off to get the full API response, including validation.warnings and metadata, with the same review fields added.

Large files

An extraction normally waits for its result, up to 30 seconds. For large scans, set Options > Mode to Submit and Poll. Files can be up to about 7 MB, PDFs up to 20 pages (10 with OCR). See limits.

Rate limits

The API allows 60 requests per minute per key. When it's exceeded, the node waits as long as the API asks and retries.

As an AI agent tool

The node can be used as a tool by n8n's AI Agent, for extracting fields from text.

Compatibility

Tested with n8n 2.43.5.

Development

Requires Node.js 24 (n8n's dependencies don't build on Node 25 yet).

npm install
npm run dev    # starts n8n on http://localhost:5678 with this node loaded
npm test       # builds, then runs the tests in test/ against a mocked API
npm run lint

Resources

Version history

See CHANGELOG.md.

Discussion