What is OCR?

How does OCR work?

OCR works on the basis of pattern recognition. The text to be read is first scanned and recognized as an image – for example, as a JPEG file or PDF document. Then OCR software distills letters, numbers and punctuation from the image at the pixel level. From that come words and text. So if you scan a paper document, OCR software can translate it into a searchable digital document in no time.

Basically, this fundamental feature is not that special these days; virtually every copier has this basic form of OCR technology. But for more complex processes, such as digital processing of incoming invoices, you need smart OCR software that goes a step further. After converting pixels into letters, numbers and punctuation, this variant “understands” and interprets certain parts of text. If smart OCR software sees certain letter combinations, it “knows” that they constitute an invoice date or VAT number, for example.

With OCR software for the digital invoice processing process, the higher the recognition rate, the better. Because this relieves the user – or, in other words, the financial administrative officer – of the burden. By the way, this applies not only to scanned paper but also to electronically submitted documents: you can have the interpretation of the content performed by smart OCR software in both cases.

What is OCR used for?

Making documents searchable is the basic function of OCR software. The process here is as follows: you scan in and save your documents. Then, for example, if you want to see all documents that contain the word “wheelbarrow,” OCR software automatically collects them for you. Then you can use the key combination ctrl + f to jump to the relevant term in each individual document.

However, advanced OCR software can also provide you with specific information because of its ability to interpret text. Among other things, this is of great value in the digital processing of incoming invoices. Smart OCR software recognizes, for example, an order number, project number, delivery date, invoice number and invoice date and ensures that you get all this information very quickly on a silver platter.

Employees of a financial administration are greatly helped by this. After all, they no longer need to enter such invoice data because it is automatically read from scanned invoices by OCR software. If you want to optimize the digital invoice processing process, you really can’t do without OCR software these days.

The benefits of OCR

If you use OCR within the invoice processing process, there are several benefits. We list the most important ones for you!

• More efficiency
  Actually, it’s a shame that a finance clerk has to spend a significant amount of his time retyping invoice data. Indeed, the uniqueness of humans is that they can use their capabilities to perform more complex tasks, such as checking and correcting billing data. Working with OCR software, financial clerks can be used much more efficiently. Moreover, it is possible to capture more information quickly and automatically. For example, the software can quickly highlight forty individual invoice lines to make your records even more complete – a result that would take a human being much longer and more labor-intensive to achieve.

• More challenge
  Because financial administrative assistants do not have to deal with repetitive input work, their duties become more substantive and more challenging. For example, they can do audit work and follow up with customers about invoices. This makes their jobs more varied and interesting.

• Fewer errors
  The chances of a financial clerk making a typo when copying invoice data are eliminated by OCR software. In addition, an employee may shorten certain information while retyping due to time constraints. OCR software, however, ensures that all invoice information is entered with the utmost accuracy; for example, order and invoice numbers are transferred including all zeros and letters. This prevents any problems regarding the completeness of invoice data in your system.

How does Whitevision apply OCR?

Smart OCR software is offered in two forms:

1. Free-form text recognition, where data – such as the invoice date and order number – are determined by letter combination and logic;
2. Working with templates, which means training each vendor and creating a separate template for each invoice type. This method quickly produces hundreds of different templates!

Whitevision works with free-form text recognition because this system has a minimal learning curve. Those who choose Whitevision do not have to go through a lengthy familiarisation period. Indeed, right from the start, our smart OCR software is already able to interpret text and has a very high recognition rate. Based on this, an entry proposal is automatically generated to enter an invoice into the accounting system.

By the way, our OCR techniques are not only applied to invoice processing, but also in our workflow solution.

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