Pro Tip: Using Claude 3.5 Haiku for High-Volume Document Processing

What You'll Learn

• What Claude 3.5 Haiku is and how it compares to Claude 3 Opus
• The exact document routing prompt to copy and run today
• How to build a five-step document classification pipeline
• Which document types produce the most reliable routing outputs
• A cost comparison showing the business case vs. Claude 3 Opus

A purchasing manager at a services firm receives 80 to 120 documents per week: vendor invoices, contract amendments, pricing proposals, compliance reports, and the occasional piece of correspondence that does not fit any category. The current process is a shared inbox and a weekly 2-hour triage session where the manager sorts, labels, and routes each document to the appropriate team member.

That triage session is the definition of a high-value person doing low-value work. Claude 3.5 Haiku can handle the classification and routing logic in seconds per document. At $0.25 per million input tokens, processing that firm's entire weekly document intake costs less than one dollar.

Anthropic launched Claude 3.5 Haiku in November 2024 as its fastest and most cost-efficient model. On many standard benchmarks, it matches or exceeds the original Claude 3 Opus, which was considered top-tier just 12 months ago. The prompt below is ready to run today.

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The Document Routing Prompt

Copy this prompt exactly. Replace the bracketed fields with your organization's specifics.

You are a document routing assistant for a [INDUSTRY] business. Review the following document and return a JSON object with exactly these fields: { "document_type": "[one of: invoice, contract, proposal, report, compliance, correspondence, other]", "priority": "[high / medium / low - based on action required within 48 hours]", "action_required": "[the single most important next step, 15 words maximum]", "assigned_to": "[the most likely internal team: finance, legal, sales, operations, executive, or hr]", "due_date": "[any explicit deadline mentioned, or 'not specified']", "summary": "[3-sentence plain English summary of what this document is and what it requires]", "flags": "[any unusual terms, amounts above $50,000, or items requiring executive review - or 'none']" } Return only the JSON object. No preamble, no explanation. Document: [PASTE DOCUMENT TEXT HERE]

Why This Prompt Works

The JSON structure forces Haiku to produce parseable output every time. The priority field uses a concrete decision rule ("action required within 48 hours") rather than asking the model to guess urgency from context. The flags field surfaces items needing human escalation as a separate field so routing logic downstream can trigger a different path. The result is a machine-readable output that drops straight into a spreadsheet, CRM, or any workflow tool that accepts structured data.

Building the Pipeline

• Collect documents in one place. Documents should land in a shared folder (Google Drive, SharePoint, or Dropbox) before processing. Establish a naming convention: date received plus document source.
• Extract text. For PDFs, use Google Drive's built-in viewer, Adobe Acrobat, or a library like pdfplumber if you have a technical resource. For email attachments, forward to a dedicated address that saves attachments.
• Run the routing prompt. Paste the extracted text into the prompt and run via the Claude API or Claude.ai interface. Haiku returns the JSON object in under 3 seconds for most documents.
• Parse and route the output. If manual: copy the JSON into a master tracking spreadsheet. If automated: use a simple script to parse the JSON and populate your routing system.
• Review and refine. For the first two weeks, have the document owner review routing decisions and flag errors. Use feedback to refine the prompt: add industry-specific document types, adjust priority criteria, or add compliance flags.

Cost Comparison

Claude 3 Opus at $15 per million input tokens processed 100 documents per week for roughly $3. Claude 3.5 Haiku at $0.25 per million input tokens processes the same 100 documents for under $0.10. That is a 97% cost reduction. For a team currently spending $150 per month on document routing, switching to Haiku reduces the cost to under $5 per month while maintaining equivalent accuracy on structured classification tasks.

Which Document Types Work Best

High reliability: invoices (explicit amounts, dates, vendor names), contracts with standard sections, purchase orders, compliance reports with defined fields. Moderate reliability: proposals (variable structure), board reports (executive summaries vary widely). Lower reliability: documents where critical information is in a table or chart within the PDF, scanned handwritten documents, or non-English documents. For moderate and lower reliability categories, add a human review step before acting on the routing decision.