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Pdf and OCR: how to read pdf documents with OCR software?

In finance, you receive a multitude of documents. Often these are PDFs. And you want to process these in the most efficient way possible. How do you do that? Anyone who seriously wants to optimize processes cannot do without automation solutions these days. With that in mind, you may have googled the term “pdf OCR. You know that OCR (short for “Optical Character Recognition”) can mean something in processing pdf documents, such as purchase invoices. But what exactly?

OCR + pdf files: brief explanation

Converting scanned documents and PDF documents into digital versions that you can edit and archive: that’s what OCR software does. You convert contracts, letters, articles, manuals and reports into editable text in no time. Pattern recognition is at the heart of OCR. After the software scans a text, it distills letters, numbers and punctuation at the pixel level. From this comes words and text. The result: a searchable digital document that you can edit. Want to know more? Read our blog “What is OCR?”. OCR is often used to read purchase invoices, expense reports, work orders, service reports and hr files. Why? These are mostly PDFs that financial administrators have traditionally retyped. If you read a PDF file with OCR, you no longer have to perform this time-consuming, error-prone task. Convenient, because it leaves you time for non-repeating tasks that are challenging and add more value to the organization.  

Smart OCR software: the smartest choice

Regular OCR software does nothing more than convert documents into text. This basic form of text recognition is of little use in practice, because you still have to do some interpretation. A smart OCR system offers a solution: it recognizes the data on PDF documents and interprets it to present you with a logical result. An example: if there are 6 digits after the word “invoice number,” the OCR system understands the context and recognizes the digits as the invoice number. In some cases, the OCR software does not recognize a particular element on the PDF document at once. At such times, you can train the system by simply clicking on what it should have recognized. Because smart OCR software has a self-learning ability, the recognition of the element in question will work the next time. Besides, all users benefit from the ‘lesson learned’, because it is implemented in the system!  

The value of a total solution

After the OCR system recognizes the fields on a pdf document, it makes an automated suggestion. This means you no longer have to fill in the individual fields manually when you process a pdf file. But it doesn’t have to stop there. If you deploy OCR for every pdf, it is often possible to automate other actions in your administrative process as well. If you are interested in this, choose a total solution. This allows you to automatically link purchase invoices with a project number, for example, to a particular project manager, so that he or she receives the invoice for approval. This is done via advanced workflow software, which makes it possible to digitally approve a recognized invoice anytime, anywhere.

 

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