OCR technology explained
In an era characterized by innovation, technological advances have become more than promising. In this context, if the management of professional expenses was considered one of the most tedious tasks for a company, it is now carried out in all simplicity and fluidity thanks to OCR technology.
All about ocerization
Nowadays, ocerization is adopted by several softwares and in various fields, especially in finance. The solution that this technology provides responds to several needs expressed by certain professions whose data entry and archiving have become a daily hell.
In this article, we will see together what optical character recognition is and the impacts of its contributions.
What is OCR?
To put it simply, we can define OCR as being a text recognition software which, thanks to a simple scan, extracts the content of an image and transforms it into character strings to save them in a format that can be used by programs. In other words, it is a process aiming at a complete alphanumeric recognition of the printed or handwritten characters in order to store them in the form of data.
To recognize characters, the software inspects and scans the image pixel by pixel, looking for shapes that match the characteristics of the characters. Depending on the level of complexity or the degree of development of the software, it will look for matches with the characters and fonts available in the program, or it will try to identify the characters by analyzing their characteristics.
The OCR can analyze the elements of the document (blocks of text, images, tables…), examine the empty spaces and decompose the text into lines, words, and characters.
What are the advantages of OCR?
The birth of this new technology has made everyday life easier for several players, especially those in the accounting world. It enables them to retrieve information quickly and accurately, transfer it electronically and facilitate the management of these documents in an efficient, secure, and flexible manner.
To help you illustrate the benefits of this means of intelligent recognition, we have identified a few advantages for you:
Entering data into a computer system for use in other processes is one of the most taxing and time-consuming tasks. Automating this type of work means that this time can be used for more useful tasks.
As we pointed out just before, any text document, even if it is an image, can be converted into an editable document using OCR software. The system also allows you to search for keywords in the text and compare documents.
By increasing the speed of information processing and eliminating the possibility of errors when entering data into the system, productivity is increased and ultimately customer service is improved.
The implementation of this type of solution is very fast and its maintenance is simple, the return on investment is therefore very fast.
An OCR system provides an archive of digitized and standardized documents with accessible information. In this way, in addition to obtaining more efficient archives, the space devoted to the storage of physical documents is considerably reduced.
Document processing can be done manually at any time or can be automated and scheduled in batch files.
By enabling the editing of documents, especially in the case of PDF documents, confidential information and other “hidden data” such as metadata, comments, text layers, bookmarks, etc. can be deleted.
Optical character recognition facilitates access to documents for people with hearing or visual impairments.
What are the features of an OCR software?
When we want to copy text from an image and import it into a word processor, the first thing that comes to mind is to transcribe it to our computer. However, the task of transcribing a document whose data we do not have access to, whether on paper or in digital format, can be very tiring.
Thanks to the evolution of digital recognition applications, we can have all the documents we want to be scanned in text format with a high degree of precision so that we can work with them as if they were plain text.
To give you an idea, we offer you some features of this software:
- Reliable Character Recognition: Provides accurate and fast results and some solutions can recognize up to 200 different languages.
- Wide range of supported formats: Excel, Word, PDF, OpenDocument text, PowerPoint, HTML, and other formats.
- Recognition of bar codes and historical fonts
- Document separation: automatically separates documents taking into account the number of pages, blank pages, bar codes, or programmed rules.
- Integration with other systems
The technical recommendations concerning OCR mainly refer to the minimum resolution of the scanned image since, as mentioned above, this is a determining factor for obtaining a satisfactory result. The higher the scanning resolution, the greater the accuracy of the OCR.
Expensya, a solution that enables the ocerization of financial documents
Expensya’s OCR + technology is much more advanced and precise than what you have seen before: it does not only enter in a few seconds all the relevant information on an invoice (amount, multi-VAT, date, category, payment method, currency, etc.) It also manages to retrieve invoices for you, read email invoices, enter dozens of invoices or even fetch level 3 data (tourist tax, noon/evening differentiation, etc…), and this, based on the keywords present on the supporting documents.
A revelation for companies and their employees since it allows them to save much more time and money. Visit the Expensya website to take full advantage of the solution and its advantage of ocerization for 30 days and without obligation.
Also read: Expensya’s Updates [OCTOBER 2021]
