OCR in Finance and Accounting
Finance and accounting documents play a critical role in driving business processes. Businesses process and verify various financial or accounting documents such as invoices, receipts or purchase orders as part of their daily workflow. As businesses grow, they have to handle and process many such financial documents. Organizations tend to have dedicated accounting teams to check financial documents, enter data into accounting software, verify data against supporting documentation and finally process transactions if necessary. For example, an organization may need to validate a supplier’s invoice against a purchase order it has issued before approving/processing the invoice. This requires a validation process that matches each item on the invoice with a corresponding entry in the PO.
Such effort-intensive procedures must be carried out within the framework of the relevant legal obligations. Often shared as scanned documents, PDFs or paper, it takes a lot of manual effort to incorporate these documents into digital workflows. These manual processes performed by finance and accounting staff are extremely time-consuming and error-prone. This is where OCR comes in, helping to reduce these manual efforts.
OCR in Finance and Accounting is the use of OCR technology to automate the extraction of financial/accounting data from relevant documents. OCR can automatically recognize and extract text, characters, areas or data from scanned documents and images. OCR technology can greatly reduce processing times for each document. With OCR, relevant fields or table data can be captured from trial balances, instruction documents, invoices, receipts, declarations, and sent to the relevant system in the desired format.
The use of OCR saves the manual efforts of staff in this area, allowing them to focus on more value-adding work.
Benefits:
Those working in finance and accounting are increasingly using OCR to shift their focus and time from data entry to analysis. Looking at other benefits;
Increased processing speed – with OCR, data is captured and validated in minutes. Time savings of up to 80% compared to manual processing.
Increased employee motivation – Manual and repetitive processes can be boring for employees. By automating as much of this work as possible with OCR, employees are motivated to focus on their core work.
Reduced costs – Both effort and document storage costs are reduced.
Increased data accuracy – OCR leverages AI capabilities to deliver a high degree of accuracy when capturing data from documents.
Intelligent classification – with Papirus AI you can automatically classify your documents. Remittance instruction, self-employment receipt, voucher, etc. The system automatically classifies the types itself.
Scaling – With OCR, very high volumes of documents are easily processed in minutes.
Areas of Use:
Serious efficiencies can be achieved by using OCR in finance and accounting. Looking at sample documents;
Finance:
- Application forms
- Balance Sheets
- Instruction Requests
- Checks
- Customer contracts
- Import/Export transaction documents
- Declarations
Accounting:
- Printed invoice
- Plug
- E-invoice, e-archive etc.
- Receipts
Processes you can automate on financial and accounting documents related to Papirus AI;
- Data capture
- Document classification
- Barcode reading
- Signature Control
- Space occupancy control
- Checkbox occupancy check
- Data masking (physical on document image)
- No separate template definition is required for each document. Provides ready-made models for frequently used documents.
- Captures data from semi-structured or unstructured documents, multi-page documents, tables and multi-line documents.
- Fully customizable to suit the need. Papirus AI does not have the limitations of traditional packaged OCR products.
- Captures data with minimal validation effort. The efficiency of this process is also increased with the verification interface it offers in line with the need.
