Overview

Best Option Co. is a U.S.-based software agency that builds intelligent systems for fintech and operational automation. When True Advance Inc. (dba TrueAdvance.biz) hired Best Option to develop a custom underwriting platform, they granted full authority over architecture, tool selection, and budget. The goal: create a powerful, automated way to process financial statements and extract the insights needed for small business underwriting. Best Option initially built a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) using a mix of open-source and third-party tools — until Michael Rodriguez, founder of Best Option, discovered Upstage. That discovery changed the direction of the project.

The Challenge

In its MVP stage, the True Advance underwriting platform relied on a patchwork of tools to process and understand financial documents: 

• DocuClipper for structured data extraction from PDFs. 
• A random open-source GitHub PDF parser for low-level text parsing. 
• ChatGPT API for labeling extracted data such as business names, transactions, and recurring debits. 

The Solution

After connecting with Upstage, Best Option replaced all three tools with one unified API. Upstage now powers the entire document intelligence layer of True Advance’s underwriting platform, which runs on a React frontend, Node.js backend, and MySQL database. The platform now delivers: 

• Native PDF parsing without external libraries. 
• Accurate table, key-value, and entity extraction in a single step. 
• Business name recognition and recurring transaction detection. 
• Seamless integration from Node.js to MySQL for immediate data storage and analysis. 

This simplified both the tech stack and the operational workflow — reducing complexity, improving reliability, and speeding up deployment.

The Results

“We built the MVP using a random GitHub parser, DocuClipper, and ChatGPT just to make it work. When I discovered Upstage, we realized we could replace the entire patchwork with a single, clean API. That decision changed everything — faster results, higher accuracy, zero maintenance.” 

— Michael Rodriguez, Founder, Best Option Co.

Partnership Experience

Upstage has been an exceptional partner to work with. From the moment we began our evaluation, their team showed genuine generosity and commitment to helping us succeed. They granted Best Option a $1,000 credit to test their API extensively with our platform — which allowed us to validate and refine our integration with confidence. Beyond the technology itself, Upstage’s service has been world-class. Our Account Manager, Galina, has been incredibly responsive and proactive, and head of US Kasey Roh, has provided outstanding support throughout the process. Upstage offered us a great price and backed it with real, consistent value. Their team is focused, serious, and unified — from account management to engineering — working as a single unit to deliver measurable results. Upstage isn’t just a document extraction tool; it’s a partner that enables innovation and operational excellence for businesses handling complex data workflows.

Workflow Impact 

Before using Upstage, our underwriting process was fully manual: 

• All client bank statements and documents came into submission@trueadvance.biz, but from there each file still had to be: 
  
  • Downloaded
  • Opened individually 
  • Reviewed page-by-page 

• Underwriters then had to manually extract and calculate key metrics, including: ○ Total deposits & revenue trends 
  
  • Average daily balance 
  • Overdraft fees and number of negative balance days 
  • Loan debits and loan deposits to separate revenue from operating expenses 
• They also had to manually build the underwriting scorecard, copying numbers into Excel sheets and tallying patterns by hand. 
• This required a high level of attention and experience, and outcomes varied depending on the underwriter. 

After integrating Upstage: 

• The statements that arrive through submission@trueadvance.biz now get parsed and extracted automatically. 
• Upstage pulls the financial data directly from the statement PDFs and pushes it into our database. 
• Our internal underwriting UI now displays: 
  
  • Structured financial summaries 
  • Automated scorecard fields 
  • Flags for overdrafts, revenue fluctuations, and debt behaviors 
• Underwriters now review data instead of compiling it. 

This changed the workflow from copying and pasting into Excel to analyzing a clean, standardized underwriting dashboard. 

Result / Impact: 

• Review time decreased from 25–40 minutes per file to ~6–8 minutes 
• Consistency improved as the scorecard is now generated automatically 
• New underwriters ramp faster because they no longer need to interpret every bank’s PDF layout 
• Underwriters now focus on decision-making rather than manual data extraction 

In short, Upstage allowed us to transform underwriting from a labor-intensive document exercise into a scalable data-driven workflow.