RuralCo's Success Story

Industry: Financial Services & Agriculture
Location: New Zealand
Iron Software Products Used: IronOCR, IronXL, IronPDF, IronPrint, IronZip

Overview

RuralCo is a New Zealand-based company providing financial and credit services to farmers in remote and rural communities. With a small team of developers and a complex technical landscape, RuralCo needed a powerful and reliable suite of tools to streamline PDF, Excel, OCR, printing, and compressed file processing for their farmer-focused credit platform. Iron Software delivered the speed, integration, and developer productivity they required to transform their infrastructure and customer experience.

Challenge

RuralCo processes thousands of invoices from merchants across rural New Zealand, many of which arrive as scanned or handwritten PDFs. Their team needed to:

• Extract critical billing data from both handwritten and computer-generated documents.
• Convert Excel-based merchant data into structured formats usable by their backend.
• Render web-based documents into pixel-perfect, print-ready PDFs.
• Work seamlessly with zipped, encrypted invoice batches received from banks and vendors.
• Ensure compatibility across server-based .NET infrastructure.

"PDFs are a complex format because things can appear all over the place. Processing them in under 10 minutes with 95%+ accuracy was our benchmark," said Jordan Heathcote, Cloud Developer at RuralCo.

Solution

RuralCo selected Iron Software’s suite of C# libraries after testing them against various open-source and commercial alternatives, including Tesseract and Google Document AI. All tools were chosen for their ease of integration, server-side compatibility, and unified support model.

IronOCR: Extracting Data from Handwritten Invoices

RuralCo uses IronOCR to handle a range of handwritten and printed invoice formats sent by vendors and merchants.

"IronOCR handles our needs by extracting certain values - invoice numbers, dates, merchants, line items, and prices. It’s a huge help for our billing process," Jordan explained. "We’re getting over 95% accuracy, which is great for our use case."

IronXL: Automating Excel Processing and Batch Tools

IronXL has become integral for transforming human-generated Excel data into structured, processable content.

"I had to build a custom tool using IronXL to generate transactions from existing data. I did it in two hours, what would’ve taken weeks manually. It saved our skin," Jordan said.

IronPDF: Generating Web-Perfect Printable Documents

To serve rural farmers, RuralCo needed to generate statements that render accurately in both digital and printed form.

"We had no detectable differences between what we printed and what we rendered on the web. That kind of consistency is critical for customer communications."

IronPrint: High-Fidelity Printed Statements

IronPrint supports their need to deliver consistent documentation to customers via mail and in-branch visits.

"Some customers still want paper statements. We had to ensure our printouts matched the on-screen version exactly and IronPrint made that possible."

IronZip: Managing Sensitive, Encrypted Bulk Files

RuralCo receives daily invoice and transaction data in zipped, encrypted formats.

"We deal with sensitive financial data every day. IronZip helped us reliably process password-protected, compressed files shared between institutions without breaking our background processing jobs," Jordan said.

Results

With Iron Software, RuralCo has:

• Achieved over 95% accuracy in OCR extraction from a mix of handwritten and digital PDFs.
• Built a custom batch tool using IronXL in two hours that replaced weeks of manual intervention.
• Delivered monthly statements to farmers faster, with a significant reduction in errors and processing time.
• Increased developer productivity by reducing the need to manage multiple separate libraries.
• Benefited from fast, effective technical support that led to adoption.

"What mattered to us was having all the tools in a concise package. It just had to work. And it did," said Jordan.

"It’s more important to save developer time than CPU cycles. Developer time is expensive and Iron Software gives us more of it."

Why Iron Software?

RuralCo’s decision was shaped by more than features:

• Speed to Solution: Tools worked immediately without requiring weeks of ramp-up.
• Developer Efficiency: Reduced time spent managing fragmented toolchains.
• Reliable Support: Fast answers from Iron Software’s technical team.
• Cost Savings: Freed up developers to focus on business logic, not edge-case file parsing.

"Iron Software helps us hit deadlines. It saves time, saves money, and lets us focus on delivering what our customers need. It just makes us faster," Jordan said.

"Support was a big factor, we had quick answers via live chat during our trial. That gave us confidence to adopt."

Try It for Yourself

If your organization processes documents at scale, manages handwritten or variable-format inputs, or needs developer-first tools that "just work," consider trying Iron Software. Like RuralCo, you might find it’s exactly what your team needs to solve complex problems faster.