Quality assurance – lab test reports from PDFs as a table

In short: Tiro reads laboratory test reports and certificates of analysis from PDFs and scans and returns them as a table – header fields such as report number, sample, lot and overall assessment once per document, every tested parameter as its own row with method, LOQ, result, limit and assessment. No template, no training – the example is a two-page report with 21 parameters, one of them above its limit.

Below is the complete example: the report, the extracted data and the result in the app.

Who this is built for

Whoever runs the laboratory writes test reports – whoever has many samples tested by contract laboratories receives them. Quality assurance at food importers, brand owners and retailers, at water suppliers and environmental consultancies, at consumer-goods and packaging buyers gets a report for every lot, every sampling point, every product: from Eurofins, SGS, Intertek, AGROLAB or the regional lab, as PDF by e-mail or from a customer portal, each in a different layout. The values then have to be recorded for the lot release, the supplier trend and the audit file – parameter by parameter. That retyping is what disappears.

What else quality teams use it for

• Test reports for food and feed (the example below; scanned reports work as shown on the PDFs & scans page): microbiology, contaminants, pesticide residues, mycotoxins, allergens, nutritional analysis – one row per parameter per lot.
• Certificates of analysis (CoA) from raw material, ingredient and packaging suppliers: batch, parameter, specification, result – as rows for the batch record.
• Drinking water and environmental analyses: water, soil, waste and air samples with parameter, LOQ, limit and result – for the sampling-point history and the report to the authority.
• Consumer product and textile testing: chemical safety (REACH, formaldehyde, phthalates, azo dyes), physical and flammability tests from the test house.
• Calibration certificates and first article inspection reports: instrument, serial number, deviation, next due date – or characteristics, nominal, actual, tolerance.

Why not just a PDF-to-Excel converter?

A PDF-to-Excel converter copies the page layout into cells. For a lab report that means group headings and footnotes between the results, "< 0.005" as text that Excel cannot sum or compare, pages that land in separate sheets, and a different column order for every laboratory. Parseur and Airparser solve this with fields instead of layout, but neither of them shows a laboratory report – their world is invoices and e-mails. Tiro takes the field approach into the quality department with one difference that matters at lot release: numbers and dates are normalised by default, and values below the limit of quantification stay honest – as printed in a text column, empty in the number column, never silently turned into a number. What comes out of Tiro, Excel can compare against your specification right away.