Receipt and Invoice Scanning

In my capacity as chief technologist for bookkeepers, I checkout the progress on scanning of receipts etc . Five years ago I  had a look and the best then was a system where you had to describe the region of the document where the item you wanted plucked off was located. This was ok if you had hundreds of those receipts and if you have that many constant transactions you would be better off with a direct e-business arrangement. Years ago E-commerce referred to the electronic transmission of financial documents eg sending orders, getting receipts. These days E-commerce means having a web page where you can sell stuff.

This time around the Neat Company is getting closer. They even have a hopper to load different sized paper. This system uses OCR but there are still too many mistakes in the scanned numbers to make any time savings because of manual corrections.  If a bookkeeper can accurately feed through 100 receipts and this software can pick out relevant numbers like Total Cost and GST and place them into a file and there are no mistakes then you will have a winner.

There's also the  Certify Mobile Company where you can take a photo of the receipt and up to 15 items are extracted to a file. They are cagey about how this is done but there is meant to be no human involvement.  I would rather see the results go to my local device rather than be sent to the cloud for a fee.

Maybe in another five years we will have scanners where the DPI will be such that 100 documents will get 100% recognition rates. You can always cut out the middle man which brings us back to E-business or more likely E-receipts.  The E-receipt company will send receipts electronically and you will have your own cloud account where these transactions are stored.  Bookkeepers could save a lot of typing if they had access to that.  Not too far off everyone will have cloud account created when you are born.

Don't believe the Zero company hype about bookkeepers disappearing into the Internet.  Bookkeepers will still have to sort out the mess.