If there’s one thing that’s really of immense benefit to any accounting department, it’s an automated document processing software that’s widely used in various business areas. Intelligent forms processing is also among the possibilities to optimize the work process and make it much more pleasant for all parties involved in it.
OCR is the tool with which the processing of fixed forms becomes many times easier, and with the help of which working with a large number of documents on a daily and monthly basis does not lead to difficulties for employees – loss of valuable time, making mistakes, etc. optical character recognition is applicable not only to PDF documents but also to scanned ones, and the business benefits of implementing this software in company structures are endless.
Understanding of the OCR – what are the key points?
When it comes to forms processing the challenges for employees can be really many. From not being able to handle the large volume of documents to making mistakes when extracting the data – all this can have a negative impact on the company’s reputation and on work productivity as well. All these reasons make business owners to integrate OCR software, which:
- solves a large part of the problems in the accounting department when it comes to processing documents of different types – contracts, bills of lading, survey cards and others. In order to rationalize and automate the work process in all its aspects, it is imperative these days to rely on intelligent solutions such as those of Smart Soft and OCR software;
- optical character recognition is a modern technology that leads to the optimization of accounting operations and to benefits for the company’s reputation – intelligently capturing key information from incoming documents in the form of a scanned or PDF file is a way to speed up the work process and direct our attention to more important and even critical business issues;
- and something else… Fixed forms can be encountered in practice under different variants and in sectors such as industrial, commercial, etc. Documents often have checkboxes, text input areas, they can be well-structured or unstructured. Whatever the case may be, OCR technology has the potential to handle any case, even more complex than usual.
OCR for fixed forms is a modern way to achieve good professional results that will have a positive impact over time. Smart Soft have taken care to make this high-tech solution available to modern businesses, which are increasingly in need of such intelligent solutions to optimize various accounting operations.
In what varieties we may meet the fixed forms?
As we have already said, fixed forms can be precisely and clearly structured, but at the same time unstructured. To the delight of modern companies solutions like OCR software can handle different configurations, even if they are more complex and unstructured layouts. The main varieties of fixed forms are the following:
- fixed formats (unstructured) – this category includes tax documents from government sectors, tests with a standard structure, claims from insurers and other documents with a predictable structure. Their layout includes squares, fields, spaces for signatures and comments, etc.;
- semi-structured layout documents – a good example of this kind of fixed forms are bills of lading and invoices, which when from the same sender have a similar and easily predictable structure. However, there may be slight deviations in the number of lines, which increases if the text is more voluminous than usual. In this case, as with unstructured documents, the authoring software needs to have a more flexible way of working to cope with such challenges;
- unstructured format – this is the last variety under which the fixed forms may be met with. It is also the most complex in terms of its processing, but with intelligent solutions such as OCR documents such as letters, contracts, reports and other documents with an unclear structure can be successfully processed.
Modern software solutions like those of Smart Soft are a step towards a successful business and proper accounting. It is worth it for every modern and dynamically developing company to take advantage of them in order to be successful in financial and corporate terms – sometimes the processing of documents and their credibility is the condition for this.
What are the most common problems with OCR software processing?
Among the possible difficulties that may arise during the processing of the fixed forms with the help of OCR are their poor printing, the way the documents are filled out, the level of image quality and the layout, which includes distortions during scanning, etc.
What are the main advantages of automatic form reading and is it possible to interact with a scanned document?
The benefits of using OCR are accepting documents in different ways, intelligent validation, data integration, protection for users and extensibility. Another advantage of the software is that it can work both with PDF documents and with scanned ones, as in the second option OCR is applied in order to transform the image into text that can be edited afterwards.
