OCR in practice
OCR stands for Optical Character Recognition. It is the technology that reads the text in a photo or a scanned document and turns it into real text that you can copy, search and have a program process.
For a business it removes the need to retype paper documents or PDFs: supplier invoices, receipts, delivery notes, handwritten forms. Instead of typing in amounts and dates, the system reads them and enters them in your management software or an Excel sheet.
An example: you photograph your expense receipts with your phone, send them to a dedicated inbox and the system extracts the date, supplier and amount, records them in a table and files the image. At the end of the month your expense report is ready. Today OCR is often paired with artificial intelligence, which can also tell which figure is the total and which is the VAT when the layout changes from one supplier to the next.
The main limit is image quality: crooked, blurry or poorly lit photos, and handwriting, all increase errors. For data that matters, such as amounts and VAT numbers, plan a quick human check before it reaches your accounts, perhaps only on the documents the system flags as uncertain. Whenever you can, ask suppliers for digital documents: an original PDF reads far better than a scan.
