I have come across a few paid services for this (I think, parserr and docparser) that appear to take a PDF and import it into a spreadsheet based on some rules, but $30/month starting isn't worth it for this process and I would prefer (though not 100% opposed) to not send the documents out to another 3rd party.. Wondering if there is anything out there (heavy searching has not netted what I'm looking for yet) that could automatically collect data off a PDF (flat, not a form) and input into a google sheet (IE upload the PDF to a google drive folder and some process runs and loads the data into the sheet). Specifically this would be to input pay stub information (gross, net, taxes, vacation days, 401k, etc) into a record based on the weekly pay stub, which is always in the same structured format and received via PDF by email.

I tried uploading the pdf manually and then doing "open with" as a google doc which OCRs the page and spits it into a doc file. The problem is the formatting appears to be totally destroyed and I don't yet see a way to methodically pick out the right fields and load into a sheet each time - at that point it would be easier to input by hand.

Point in the right direction would be much appreciated (or a "no, what you're looking for doesn't exist" too).