Automated Receipt Processing Software Using OCR & Deep Learning

Optical Character Recognition (OCR) and deep learning have become crucial aspects of document automation. OCR helps in data extraction and deep learning helps in the evolution of the document automation solution.

Enterprises are looking for these technologies in the document automation solution that they would like to adopt to automate and digitize documents like invoices, receipts, purchase orders and so on.

Receipt OCR is part of the document automation platform that aims at extracting meaningful data from scanned receipts. Common fields in receipts like description, unit price, quantity, receipt number, tax amount, total amount, vendor name etc. are captured by the platform.

Data extraction from receipts enabled by OCR can be used to digitize data of the receipts and store them in your desired backend in a structured way.

What is Receipt Processing Software?

Receipt processing software is designed to automate and digitize the entire process of storing information from a receipt to the backend without human intervention.

Enterprises deal with a lot of unstructured data on daily basis. PDFs scanned hard copies, email receipts are not structured properly. Managing these manually becomes a painfully tedious task and hampers the productivity of employees and the overall growth of the business. At times, important information may go missing and therefore, trust between you and your vendor may reduce if such instances keep repeating. Receipt data entry can be completely automated, end-to-end if enterprises leverage receipt processing software.

Extracting data from receipts and transforming them into structured datasets and documents at the backend can help ease your business process. Archiving of data, indexing documents, and gathering document analysis, can all be done seamlessly. Departments such as finance and accounts can leverage receipt processing software to automate their data entry work so that they can focus on completing other mission-critical tasks at hand.

OCR for Receipt Recognition

OCR is mainly used to read text from documents such as scanned PDFs or image documents. This technology is mainly leveraged by receipt processing software to transform images into meaningful sets of written text, be it typed, handwritten or in printed form to computer-readable text data.

There are different approaches to OCR. The most conventional method is computer vision. Different tasks that computer vision performs are as follows:

• Usage of filters to separate characters from the background
• Apply contour detection to identify the characters that have been filtered
• Using image classification to recognize characters

Using filters and image classification is a straightforward process. However, contour matching is quite a challenge. Apart from that, it requires a lot of manual effort and is not generalizable.

We will take a deeper look at receipt processing software and OCR & deep learning are leveraged by document automation solutions to streamline your business processes.

Importance of Deep Learning in Receipt Processing 

Deep learning is a part of machine learning process.  It is a neural network compressed of three or more layers. This neural network aims at predicting human behaviour and matching its ability. In receipt processing software, it is used for extracting and interpreting data as a human would do and not just extracting on face value. Additional layers of a neural network can improve the accuracy of data extraction from receipts.

Deep learning plays an important in different artificial intelligence applications, with document automation solutions being one of them. Receipt processing software’s ability to interpret data just like a human would and hence, replace the need for human intervention in the entire document automation process.

Areas Where Receipt Processing Software is Useful

Receipt processing software are useful for many industries and departments. Some of them are:

Finance & Accounts

Finance and accounts departments in every firm deal with high volume of receipts on day-to-day basis. Documentation for accounts payable and accounts receivable is a tedious task when done manually. Miscommunication between employees, managers, customers and vendors may also take place. By having receipt processing softwares, transparency increases, working capital is reduced and it makes it easier to manage and track receipt documentation.

Supply Chain Management

Supply chain are core part of functioning for many manufacturing and retail businesses. Flow of information, managing day-to-day tasks, flow of products, everything needs to be in perfect chain to ensure proper control of supply and production. If organiztaions have to meet delivery deadlines and maintain costs within allocated budgets, it is important to manage this flow.

The companies that are truly thriving these days have something significant in common: a digitized supply chain. 89% of companies with digital supply chains receive perfect orders from international suppliers, ensuring on-time delivery. One of the key elements of realising the next generation digital Supply Chain 4.0, is automating data capturing and management and a lot of this data is in the form of receipts and invoices.  Manual entry of receipts acts as a bottleneck across the supply chain and leads to unnecessary delays. If this receipt processing is digitized it can lead to substantial gains in time and efficiency.

Conclusion

Receipt processing software has multiple benefits. One key aspect of having a receipt automation solution is that receipts are processed faster meaning that payments are cleared on time. This builds trust with your merchants and strengthens your business relationship with them. Apart from that, it makes the business process seamless for you to focus on avenues to grow your business.

KlearStack AI has state-of-the-art technologies to automate your documents and make organize data even from unseen documents. If you would like to know more about our solution, schedule a demo now.