Extract data from business letters and memos

Business letters and memos are the workhorse of formal correspondence, and behind the familiar layout sits a set of header fields that map almost exactly onto the fields RFC 5322, the Internet Message Format, defines for email. From lines name the author, To lines the primary recipient, and a Cc line the people copied; a Reply-To can redirect responses, a Subject states the topic, and a Message-ID and In-Reply-To thread one letter to another. Records teams, shared-service centers, and correspondence-management systems read the same header from a scanned letter that an email client reads from a message: who sent it, to whom, on what date, about what, and in reply to which earlier item. Dated 2026-06-15, a letter from Helena Braun at Fassbind Interiors GmbH to James Calloway at Atlas Retail Group, copied to two colleagues, carries exactly that routing metadata even though it arrived as a PDF rather than an email. Header fields are scattered around the page and worded loosely, which is what makes them awkward to capture by hand. Sender blocks carry a name, a title, a department, and contact details spread across a letterhead, while the recipient block sits lower with a name, an organization, and a mailing address. Subject lines may be labeled Re or left implicit in the first paragraph, a salutation and a closing bracket the body, and a signatory block at the foot names who actually signed. Some letters are formal notices with an effective date that matters, such as 2026-07-01, others reference a prior letter that has to be linked, and enclosures are listed at the end. Memos drop the mailing address but keep From, To, Date, and Subject, so the same field set covers both a memo and a full letter. Talonic reads the letter or memo and returns the sender and recipient blocks, the date, the subject, the salutation, a body summary, the closing, the signatory, and any enclosures as fields, aligned to the RFC 5322 header names. One letter dated 2026-06-15 from Helena Braun, Head of Procurement at Fassbind Interiors GmbH, to James Calloway at Atlas Retail Group, subject "Revised delivery schedule for order AT-4471", copying two recipients and enclosing a schedule, loads into a correspondence system as fields, and the same extraction exports to CSV when a register is the destination, so a records team files and searches letters by sender, date, and subject rather than opening each PDF.

What gets extracted from business letters and memos

How extraction works for business letters and memos

Business letters and memos reach a records team as scanned correspondence, letterhead PDFs, and exported documents, and the header fields sit wherever the letterhead and the layout put them. Talonic classifies the document and maps it to the correspondence schema in the Field Registry, which mirrors the RFC 5322 header fields so the sender, the recipient, the date, the subject, and any Cc or Reply-To each resolve to a named field. Sender details split into a name, a title, a department, and contact information, the recipient block into a name, an organization, and a mailing address, while the salutation, the body summary, the closing, and the signatory are captured in order. Where a subject is labeled Re or implied in the opening line, it is normalized to a subject field, the letter date parses to ISO 8601, and a reference to a prior letter is kept so a reply threads to what it answers. Each value returns with a confidence score and a pixel-region pointer per DIN SPEC 91491, so a records team can verify a sender or a date against the source letter before filing it. Because a business letter carries no line-item tables, the output is a flat set of header and body fields rather than nested tables.

Sample extraction

A formal business letter on company letterhead

{
  "document_type": "business_letter",
  "document_number": "FI-2026-0615",
  "document_date": "2026-06-15",
  "from": "h.braun@fassbind-interiors.de",
  "sender.name": "Helena Braun",
  "sender.title": "Head of Procurement",
  "sender.department": "Procurement",
  "to": "j.calloway@atlasretail.com",
  "recipient.name": "James Calloway",
  "recipient.organization": "Atlas Retail Group",
  "recipient.address": "18 Kingsway, London WC2B 6AA, United Kingdom",
  "cc": "Two recipients copied",
  "subject": "Revised delivery schedule for order AT-4471",
  "salutation": "Dear Mr. Calloway",
  "body_summary": "Confirms a revised delivery schedule for order AT-4471 and requests written acknowledgment",
  "closing_statement": "Yours sincerely",
  "signatory": "Helena Braun, Head of Procurement",
  "attachments": [
    "Revised delivery schedule"
  ],
  "language": "English"
}

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