SimpleIndex 12 and a new SimpleIndex.com
The biggest release in years: fully optional AI that reads what a template cannot, a new Workflow Manager, and one license that now runs the whole suite.
Version 12 is a free upgrade if your annual support is current. Not sure if your maintenance is current? Contact us and we’ll confirm your current renewal status.
Claude, ChatGPT and Gemini are now optional tools for your documents
Pick your provider, add your own API key, and pay them directly. We take no cut and charge nothing per page.
What makes it useful is that you choose the engine field by field. Draw a zone around one handwritten box and hand that zone to the model while the rest of the page stays on your local engine. Or skip the zone entirely and name an index field after the label printed on the form, “Patient Date of Birth,” so the model finds the label and reads what is written next to it. A complicated handwritten form stops being a template problem.
How the AI options fit together
Your local OCR engine still does the heavy lifting
Tesseract or ABBYY FineReader reads the full page on your own hardware, and that pass is what makes the document searchable, because a local engine reports where every word sits. A language model does not, so a model on its own cannot give you full text search. The model is asked for the fields a template cannot describe, and you decide which pages are sent to it at all.
Nothing is read twice. Fields the model has already filled are not read again by the other engines, and zone fields now read text that is already on the page instead of recognizing the same area a second time. The prompt and completion token counts are appended to the text output, so you can see what a batch costs.
Zone, dynamic and AI extraction
The Workflow Manager, new in version 12
A workflow is a list of steps that runs start to finish without anyone driving it. A step can be a SimpleIndex capture job, an export, a delivery, an accounting procedure against QuickBooks desktop or QuickBooks Online, SimpleCoversheet, SimpleExport, or a program of your own that has nothing to do with Simple Software. So the scan, the export, the delivery and the posting stop being four things somebody has to remember to do in the right order.
A step can also open a folder in the viewer, which means a workflow can finish by showing a person the documents it just produced rather than leaving them to go and find the folder.
Two things worth knowing before you build a workflow: A workflow stops when a step fails, instead of carrying on through the rest and letting a failure in the middle go unnoticed, and you can watch a job’s log while it runs, with enhanced detail turned up for a single run without editing the job. One job list file can hold several jobs, lists are switchable, and every step can carry its own notes.
Running a workflow unattended, as a service, still needs the Server Processing add-on.
One Professional license now runs five applications
An activated Professional workstation license is a valid runtime license for SimpleView, SimpleExport, SimpleCoversheet, SimpleSend and the Workflow Manager. No second serial number, no separate activation, and no tracking down which machine has which key. Capture’s license takes precedence, and a companion product falls back to its own license only on a machine that has no Professional license on it.
Two exclusions to this: Concurrent licensing is not covered, because only the license server can hand out seats and it has no way to know how many the suite should get. And running unattended still needs the Server Processing add-on, which is a separate purchase.
Email, cloud OCR, and the accounting integration are all included with Professional and all still sold separately, so a Standard license can add any of these optional components on its own.
Installing no longer needs an administrator
The last components that required registration are gone, self registration has been removed, and the runtime libraries now install beside the applications rather than into shared system folders. SimpleCoversheet and SimpleView can now be activated on a per-user installation, which the rest of the suite could already do.
Updates within version 12 apply from the global settings application, without a full installer. Startup is also about three seconds faster, because the license check stopped recomputing a machine identifier that never changes.
Any AI, and only when you need it.
Pick your provider, add your API key. Every major LLM is supported, even open source, locally hosted ones that don’t send your data to the cloud. We take no cut and charge nothing per page. Local OCR like FineReader can be used to generate text and capture the easy stuff, saving your LLM tokens for just the handwritten fields and unstructured data. It will only prompt the LLM for the fields that are missing after local OCR, and only on the pages that are relevant.
Some of the other new features
- Cloud recognition through three providers: AWS, Microsoft Azure Document Intelligence or Google Document AI, chosen on one screen, with a button that tests your credentials before a batch depends on them
- Presets for OnBase, Laserfiche, DocuWare and Concordance, so one choice configures everything the receiving system expects
- Table fields export to their own database table, one row per line item, with a foreign key back to the document record
- A rewritten SharePoint integration that works when run as a service, accepts an application password, and stops leaving uploaded files checked out
- One log, one format, one detail setting across every application in the suite, with service errors going to the Windows event log where your monitoring can already see them
- A much smaller installer, with recognition languages downloaded the moment you select one in a job
The full list of changes and fixes is in the SimpleIndex 12 release notes.
Renew your support
Version 12 requires current support. New Standard and Professional licenses now include the first year of support, so a new workstation arrives on version 12 with nothing else to buy.
Not sure if your support is current? Contact us and we will confirm your current renewal status. What the renewal covers, and how version upgrades work, is on the upgrade policy page.
We rebuilt SimpleIndex.com, too
The mega menu is gone and six primary areas now focus the navigation.
Features now follows a document through six stages, from the scanner or file input to wherever it ends up, rather than listing capabilities alphabetically. Solutions has real pages behind it, including new ones for healthcare, legal, financial services, education and transportation. Pricing is one page with both editions and what separates them, and the short version is that the difference between Standard and Professional is which recognition engines are included. Docs and Support collects the wiki, the knowledge base, SimpleIndex University and the licensing tools in one place instead of five.
There is also a section on the features page listing six challenges SimpleIndex is not built to handle, such as cursive handwriting and multi-OS environments; we’re still Windows-only but a virtualised instance does work. It is not a document management system, and it is not hosted. We would rather you read that before buying than discover it in week three as a surprise.
Try it on your own documents
The trial ships with sample files, but sample files are not your files. Send us a stack of your own documents and we will configure a working job with them. If you do not buy, that costs you nothing. If you do, it is billed at our hourly consulting rate. Either way, you find out what version 12 does with your paperwork before you spend anything.
Request a trial, or talk to your SimpleIndex representative about a job.
