What Is Kofax? A Capture & AP-Automation Buyer's Guide

Kofax is enterprise software that turns documents into structured, usable data. In January 2024 the company rebranded as Tungsten Automation, so the products you may know as Kofax Capture, Kofax TotalAgility, and Kofax Power PDF are now sold as Tungsten Capture, Tungsten TotalAgility, and Tungsten Power PDF. The technology is the same; the name on the box changed. Founded in 1985, the company has spent four decades building tools that read paper and digital documents the way a clerk would — only faster, and at far higher volume.

For an operations, finance, or IT evaluator, the practical question is not what Kofax is called but what it does for a specific process. The most common answer is accounts payable: capturing invoices, extracting the line-item data, matching them against purchase orders, and routing the exceptions for approval. That work is where the economics are clearest, and where most buyers build their business case. The broader category is intelligent document processing, or IDP — software that combines optical character recognition, machine learning, and business rules to classify documents and pull out the fields that matter.

This guide explains what Kofax and the wider Tungsten Automation family include, how the underlying capture technology works, what an accounts-payable deployment looks like, what it costs, and how it compares with Laserfiche — a question Reynolds fields constantly, because the two are usually deployed together rather than as substitutes. Reynolds Business Systems has implemented document-capture and content-management systems for Lehigh Valley and Mid-Atlantic organizations for more than 55 years, and the patterns below reflect that field experience.

What Kofax is — and what it is now called

Kofax is a document-automation software vendor, founded in 1985, whose platform captures documents, extracts the data inside them, and drives the workflows that act on that data. In January 2024 the company rebranded as Tungsten Automation, positioning itself around AI-powered workflow automation. The rebrand renamed the product line but did not discontinue it: existing Kofax licenses, integrations, and deployments carried forward under the Tungsten name. If a vendor or a colleague refers to 'Kofax' and 'Tungsten Automation' interchangeably, they are talking about the same company and the same software.

The reason the name still matters to buyers is search and support. Documentation, community forums, and a decade of how-to material were published under 'Kofax,' while current contracts, release notes, and partner agreements use 'Tungsten.' When you evaluate the platform, expect to encounter both. The substance is intelligent document processing — software that ingests a document from any channel, figures out what it is, reads the fields you care about, validates them against your business rules, and hands the clean data to the system that needs it.

That capability sits in a fast-growing market. The global intelligent document processing market was valued at roughly $3.0 billion in 2025 and is projected to reach about $29.7 billion by 2033, a compound annual growth rate near 33.8% from 2026 to 2033. In the United States alone, the IDP market is expected to grow from about $463.1 million in 2024 to roughly $2.4 billion by 2030. Tungsten Automation is not a marginal player in that space: it has been named a Leader in Everest Group's Intelligent Document Processing PEAK Matrix for six consecutive years through 2024, driven largely by its TotalAgility platform.

How intelligent document processing actually works

IDP is best understood as an assembly line for documents. A document enters at one end as an image or file, passes through a sequence of automated stations, and exits as validated, structured data ready for a downstream system. Kofax — and most serious IDP platforms — implement the same core stages, even if the marketing names differ. Understanding the stages is what lets a buyer judge where a given product is strong and where human effort will still be required.

1. Capture and ingestion. Documents arrive from many channels — scanners and multifunction printers, monitored email inboxes, mobile photos, file uploads, EDI feeds, and APIs. The platform normalizes all of them into a single processing queue so the rest of the pipeline does not care how a document got there.
2. Image cleanup. Scanned pages are deskewed, despeckled, rotated, and cropped so the recognition engine has the cleanest possible image. Poor image quality is the single largest driver of extraction errors, which is why this unglamorous step matters.
3. Classification. The system identifies what each document is — an invoice, a remittance, a contract, a claim form — using layout analysis and machine learning. Correct classification is what routes the document to the right extraction model.
4. Recognition and extraction. Optical character recognition converts the image to text, and extraction models pull the specific fields you care about: vendor name, invoice number, totals, line items, dates. Each extracted field carries a confidence score.
5. Validation. Extracted data is checked against business rules and reference data — for example, confirming a vendor exists in your ERP master file, or that line items sum to the invoice total. Fields that fail or score below a confidence threshold are flagged as exceptions.
6. Human verification. Low-confidence fields and exceptions are routed to a person for a quick correction. Well-tuned systems keep this queue small; the goal is exception handling, not re-keying every document.
7. Export and integration. Clean, structured data and the document image are delivered to the system of record — an ECM such as Laserfiche, an ERP, or a line-of-business application — where the actual business process continues.

Accuracy is the question every evaluator asks, and the honest answer is that it depends on the document. Leading OCR and IDP engines achieve roughly 95% to 96% extraction accuracy on standard printed-text documents, with accuracy falling on complex layouts and handwriting. That figure reframes the buying decision: the value of an IDP platform is not only how much it reads automatically, but how efficiently it surfaces the small remainder for human review. A platform that extracts 95% cleanly and makes the other 5% fast to fix will beat one that claims higher accuracy but buries its exceptions.

The Kofax / Tungsten product family

Kofax is not a single product; it is a family of tools that share a capture core. Most confusion in the evaluation stage comes from treating them as interchangeable. They are not. Capture and Express handle the front-door work of getting documents in; TotalAgility adds workflow and orchestration on top; Power PDF is a desktop application for working with PDFs; and RPA bridges systems that lack modern integrations. The table below maps the family to what each piece is for.

For most document-management buyers, the decision narrows to two products. If the need is simply to digitize and index documents and push them into a content system, Capture (or Express, for a small operation) does the job. If the need is to automate a whole process — read the invoice, match it, route it, approve it, post it — TotalAgility is the platform, because it pairs the capture engine with the workflow layer. TotalAgility is also the product that earned the company its repeated Everest Group Leader recognition, which is a useful signal for risk-averse buyers comparing platforms.

Kofax Power PDF vs Adobe Acrobat

Power PDF is the one Kofax product that reaches individual desktops rather than the back office, which is why 'what does Kofax PDF do' and 'is Kofax PDF better than Adobe' are among the most common questions about the brand. Power PDF is a full-featured PDF application: it creates PDFs from any application, edits text and images directly in a PDF, converts PDFs to and from Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, applies redaction and security, combines and splits files, and supports electronic signatures. In day-to-day use it covers the same ground a typical office worker uses Adobe Acrobat for.

The most meaningful difference for a buyer is the licensing model. Power PDF has traditionally been sold as a perpetual, one-time desktop license, whereas Adobe Acrobat is sold primarily as a per-user subscription. For organizations that equip many users with PDF tools and keep software for several years, a one-time license can be materially less expensive over the life of the deployment, and it removes the annual renewal exposure. Acrobat, in turn, offers deeper integration with Adobe's broader Document Cloud and a larger third-party ecosystem. 'Better' depends on whether you value the cloud ecosystem or the ownership cost model — both products handle the core PDF tasks competently. Reynolds advises evaluating Power PDF specifically when an organization wants to standardize a large number of desktops on a capable PDF tool without an ongoing per-seat subscription.

Using Kofax for accounts payable automation

Accounts payable is the textbook use case because every step maps cleanly onto the IDP pipeline. An invoice is a structured document that arrives constantly, must be read accurately, must be checked against another record (the purchase order), and must be approved before money moves. That is exactly the work Kofax was built to automate. A typical AP deployment on TotalAgility runs the following sequence.

1. Receive the invoice. Invoices arrive by email, PDF, paper, or EDI and are pulled into a single capture queue regardless of format.
2. Capture and extract. The platform reads header data and line items — vendor, invoice number, dates, totals, and individual charges — and scores each field for confidence.
3. Match against the purchase order. The system performs a two-way match (invoice to PO) or a three-way match (invoice to PO to goods receipt) to confirm the charge is authorized and the goods or services were received.
4. Handle exceptions. Mismatches, missing POs, and low-confidence fields are routed to AP staff with the document on screen, so the fix is a review rather than a re-key.
5. Route for approval. Clean invoices flow through an approval workflow based on amount, department, and authority rules, with an automatic audit trail of who approved what and when.
6. Post for payment. Approved, coded invoices are posted to the ERP for payment, often capturing early-payment discounts that manual processes miss.

The benchmarks explain why finance leaders pursue this. Across all organizations, only 32.6% of invoices are processed straight-through — touchless, with no manual intervention — while best-in-class AP teams reach a 49.2% touchless rate, more than double the 23.4% of their peers. The average invoice exception rate is 14.0%, and on average only 48.8% of suppliers submit invoices electronically, which is why robust capture from paper and PDF still matters. The table below shows the gap between an average AP operation and a best-in-class one.

What Kofax-style automation costs and the ROI math

There are two cost conversations: what you pay for the software, and what each invoice costs to process before and after automation. The software itself does not carry a single published price — Kofax and Tungsten are sold through partners and quoted by volume, number of users, modules, and deployment model, so a meaningful figure requires a scoped quote rather than a list price. The processing-cost side, however, is well benchmarked, and it is where the business case is built. Independent sources put the cost of manual, paper-based invoice processing at roughly $15.96 per invoice, falling to about $2.94 per invoice with automation — a reduction of roughly 74%.

Because no two benchmarks measure cost identically, it is worth seeing the range rather than a single number. The spread below comes from four independent sources and lands in a consistent band: manual processing in the low-to-mid teens of dollars per invoice, automated processing in the low single digits.

The strongest version of the business case is the best-in-class gap rather than the average. Best-in-class AP organizations achieve per-invoice processing costs 78% lower than their peers, processing an invoice for just $2.78 versus $12.88 for everyone else. That spread, not the software license, is the number a CFO should anchor on, because it represents recoverable cost that automation is specifically designed to capture. The software is a means; the per-invoice cost gap is the prize.

Speed: cycle time and early-payment discounts

Cost is only half the case; speed is the other half, and it often funds the project on its own. Businesses without automation take an average of 17.4 days to process a single invoice, against an overall average of 9.15 days and just 3.1 days for best-in-class teams. Put differently, best-in-class AP teams process invoices 82% faster than all other groups. For a finance organization, those days are not abstract — they are the window in which early-payment discounts are either captured or forfeited.

Speed also reduces less visible costs: late-payment penalties, duplicate payments made because nobody could find the original invoice, and the staff time spent answering 'where is my payment' calls from suppliers. None of those line up neatly on a single budget line, but together they are often as large as the direct processing savings. A faster, auditable cycle is the operational benefit that turns AP from a cost center into a managed process.

Kofax vs Laserfiche: capture engine vs content platform

This is the comparison Reynolds is asked about most, and it usually rests on a misunderstanding. Kofax (Tungsten Capture) and Laserfiche are not direct substitutes. Kofax is a high-volume document-capture and data-extraction engine — it lives at the front door, reading documents and pulling out data. Laserfiche is an enterprise content management and records platform — it stores, retrieves, secures, and applies retention and workflow to documents after they are captured. The two are frequently deployed together, not chosen against each other.

The practical implication for an evaluator is to stop framing the decision as 'Kofax or Laserfiche.' A complete document operation usually needs both a capture capability and a content platform. The right questions are which capture engine best fits your document mix and volume, which content platform best fits your retention and workflow needs, and how cleanly the two integrate. Laserfiche includes its own capture tools that are sufficient for many organizations; a dedicated engine like Kofax earns its place when volume, document complexity, or extraction accuracy requirements exceed what a bundled tool can handle.

Cloud vs on-premises deployment

TotalAgility can run as a cloud (SaaS) service or on-premises inside your own network, and the choice shapes cost, control, and IT workload more than any feature comparison will. Neither model is universally correct. The decision turns on your regulatory posture, your IT capacity, and how quickly you need to be live.

For most mid-sized organizations without a deep IT bench, cloud lowers the barrier to entry and shifts maintenance to the vendor, which is why it is the default recommendation when there is no compliance reason to keep data in-house. On-premises remains the right answer for organizations with strict data-residency requirements, air-gapped networks, or established data centers they intend to keep using. The middle path — a private cloud or a hybrid in which capture runs on-premises and orchestration runs in the cloud — is also common, and it is worth scoping with an implementation partner rather than defaulting to one extreme.

Standards, security, and compliance

Document automation touches records that are governed, so compliance is not an afterthought; it is part of the design. Three areas deserve direct attention in any evaluation. The first is the audit trail. Automated AP and capture workflows record who approved each document, what data was extracted, and when each step occurred — an immutable log that manual, paper-based processes cannot reliably produce. For organizations subject to internal-controls requirements, that trail is itself a primary justification for automation.

The second is data accuracy and verification controls. Because leading engines extract at roughly 95% to 96% accuracy on printed text, a compliant deployment must define confidence thresholds and a human-verification step for everything below them. The control is not 'the software is always right'; it is 'the software flags what it is unsure about, and a person confirms it.' That distinction is what auditors look for. The third is retention and disposition: captured records must inherit the same retention schedules that govern their paper originals, enforced by the content platform that receives them.

For cloud deployments, add data residency and third-party assurance to the checklist — where the data is physically hosted and whether the provider holds recognized security attestations. Regulated Pennsylvania organizations carry specific obligations: healthcare providers under HIPAA, government bodies under Pennsylvania records-retention requirements, and defense or life-sciences operations under their own frameworks. The capture and content layers should be configured to those schedules from day one, which is far cheaper than retrofitting compliance after a system is live.

How Reynolds implements Kofax and Tungsten in the Lehigh Valley

Reynolds Business Systems approaches Kofax and Tungsten Automation as the capture layer of a complete document operation, not as a standalone purchase. Because capture engines and content platforms work together, Reynolds — a Laserfiche Certified Partner — typically pairs high-volume capture with an ECM system of record, so documents are read accurately at intake and then stored, secured, and retained correctly afterward. The result is a single pipeline from the loading dock or the email inbox to the system of record, rather than two disconnected tools.

The local angle is operational, not promotional. Reynolds is based in Emmaus, Pennsylvania, and serves Allentown, Bethlehem, Easton, and the broader Mid-Atlantic, which means capture configuration, scanner deployment, and validation-rule tuning happen with on-site staff who can walk a file room and see the document mix firsthand. For an evaluator, the value of a local implementation partner is concentrated in two phases: the upfront scoping that produces an honest volume estimate and an accurate quote, and the post-launch tuning that drives the touchless rate up over the first few months. With 55 years of document-management experience, Reynolds treats both phases as the work, not the paperwork around it.

Common mistakes and when Kofax is not the right fit

Kofax is powerful, which makes it possible to over-buy. The most expensive mistakes are not technical; they are scoping errors made before any software is installed. Watch for these patterns.

• Buying the platform before mapping the process. TotalAgility automates a workflow; if the underlying AP or records process is undefined, the software simply automates confusion. Map the process first.
• Treating Kofax and Laserfiche as competitors. They are complementary — a capture engine and a content platform. Choosing one when you need both leaves a gap.
• Ignoring image quality. Extraction accuracy depends heavily on clean input. Skimping on scanning hardware or image cleanup undermines the entire pipeline.
• Underestimating exception handling. Even at 95% to 96% accuracy, a real volume of invoices needs human review. Plan staffing and verification screens for the exception queue rather than assuming a fully hands-off system.
• Skipping retention configuration. Capturing documents without applying retention schedules digitizes a compliance problem instead of solving it.

Kofax is also not the right fit for every organization. A small business processing a few dozen invoices a month will rarely recover the cost of a high-end IDP platform; a simpler departmental tool or the capture features bundled in an ECM may be sufficient. Likewise, an organization whose documents are already fully electronic and well-structured — clean EDI feeds, for instance — may not need a heavy capture engine at all. The honest test is volume and complexity: when document volume is high, formats are varied, and accuracy matters, a dedicated engine like Kofax pays for itself. When those conditions are absent, a lighter tool is the better, cheaper answer, and a good partner will say so.

Frequently asked questions

What is Kofax used for?

Kofax is used to capture documents and extract their data automatically, then drive the workflows that act on that data. The most common use is accounts payable — reading invoices, matching them to purchase orders, routing approvals, and posting them for payment — but it also handles forms, claims, contracts, and any high-volume document process.

What is Kofax called now?

Kofax rebranded as Tungsten Automation in January 2024. The products you may know as Kofax Capture, Kofax TotalAgility, and Kofax Power PDF are now Tungsten Capture, Tungsten TotalAgility, and Tungsten Power PDF. The technology and existing licenses carried forward; only the brand name changed.

What does Kofax PDF do?

Kofax Power PDF (now Tungsten Power PDF) is a desktop PDF application. It creates PDFs from any program, edits text and images inside a PDF, converts files to and from Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, applies redaction and security, combines and splits documents, and supports electronic signatures — covering the everyday PDF tasks most office workers need.

Is Kofax Power PDF better than Adobe Acrobat?

Both handle core PDF tasks competently. The main difference is licensing: Power PDF has traditionally been sold as a one-time perpetual license, while Acrobat is primarily a per-user subscription. For organizations equipping many desktops and keeping software for years, Power PDF can cost less over time; Acrobat offers a deeper cloud ecosystem. Which is 'better' depends on that tradeoff.

What is the difference between Kofax Capture and TotalAgility?

Capture handles the front-door work — scanning, OCR, classification, and data extraction — then exports documents to another system. TotalAgility includes that capture capability and adds low-code workflow and end-to-end process orchestration, so it can automate a whole process such as accounts payable rather than just digitizing documents.

How much does AP automation with Kofax save per invoice?

Independent benchmarks put manual invoice processing at roughly $15.96 per invoice and automated processing at about $2.94 — a reduction near 74%. Measured another way, best-in-class AP teams process an invoice for $2.78 versus $12.88 for all other organizations. Your actual savings depend on volume, exception rate, and how much processing becomes touchless.

Is Kofax the same as Laserfiche?

No. Kofax (Tungsten Capture) is a document-capture and data-extraction engine that reads documents at intake. Laserfiche is an enterprise content management platform that stores, secures, and applies retention and workflow to documents afterward. They serve different layers and are usually deployed together rather than chosen one over the other.

Can Kofax run in the cloud?

Yes. Tungsten TotalAgility can run as a cloud (SaaS) service or on-premises inside your own network, and private-cloud and hybrid models are also common. Cloud lowers upfront cost and shifts maintenance to the vendor; on-premises gives full data control. The right choice depends on your regulatory requirements and IT capacity.

How accurate is Kofax data extraction?

Leading OCR and IDP engines achieve roughly 95% to 96% extraction accuracy on standard printed-text documents, with accuracy lower on complex layouts and handwriting. A sound deployment sets confidence thresholds and routes anything below them to a person for quick verification, so the small remainder is corrected rather than missed.

Does Reynolds implement Kofax in Pennsylvania?

Yes. Reynolds Business Systems, based in Emmaus, Pennsylvania, implements document-capture and content-management systems for organizations across the Lehigh Valley — Allentown, Bethlehem, Easton — and the broader Mid-Atlantic. As a Laserfiche Certified Partner with 55 years of experience, Reynolds typically pairs high-volume capture with a content platform so documents are read accurately and retained correctly.