With OCR, you’ll never waste time typing out information again. The OCR software optimises the handling of large volumes of paper documents, helping companies in sectors as diverse as healthcare, public administration, logistics and finance.
2025-03-07 – Frank von Orlikowski
Optical Character Recognition (OCR) is an automatic text recognition program. With OCR, the computer filters text from an image and creates a text document from the characters by recognising letters, words and numbers. The programme uses technologies that convert typed, handwritten or printed text from images into binary-coded text.
First, text is scanned or photographed. The software examines the page layout, separates the text from the image files, and notes the number of paragraphs and pages.
OCR breaks the text down into paragraphs, then into sentences, then into words and finally into characters such as letters, punctuation marks or numbers.
To identify letters, the software compares predefined patterns with the scanned characters. It uses several methods to do this:
In the final step, OCR reassembles the recognised characters. This creates words, which are then sorted back into their place in the sentence. In addition, a grammar check in the software ensures that the sentences are correct. OCR stores the text in a document that can then be further processed. When invoices are scanned, OCR recognises this and automatically enters the correct values into the fields in the invoice file or the input mask of the incoming invoice processing software.
OCR helps businesses in a wide range of industries with document management. It relieves companies of the burden of archiving old paper files and makes it easier to process invoices and contracts by digitising documents using optical character recognition, thus enabling automated document processing.
Using OCR in your business will improve document-centric processes and make life much easier for many departments. However, there are challenges to implementing OCR in your organisation. If you keep in mind what it means to implement OCR, your business will quickly reap the benefits.
It takes at least three steps out of the process by automatically analysing, formatting and storing scanned documents in a separate file. It supports document control and contract management, and is used to search large volumes of files. OCR simplifies your workflow by capturing and cataloguing documents in the digital files and folders you specify. Automatic selection of customer-related data reduces the burden on your accounting department, and the ability to post-process documents ensures that they are accurate and up-to-date.
Manually entered data can contain gaps that challenge OCR coding. It is therefore important that certain requirements are met in advance:
Software solutions with OCR digitise processes, capture data and generate real-time forecasts for decision-making. Applications range from invoice processing and customer relationship management (CRM) to enterprise content management (ECM) and other common or specific tasks.
Software solutions that also use artificial intelligence work even faster than pure OCR applications. Using programmed learning models, they automate manual tasks, analyse data and optimise communication. One example is Shareflex ECM Online. This alternative to traditional ECM systems uses the Microsoft 365 platform to provide users with complex, cloud-based business applications.
Shareflex® Invoice
Shareflex Invoice supports your financial accounting along the entire process chain – from invoice capture to processing and archiving.
What does OCR mean in practice? A huge reduction in workload. Automatically capturing documents with OCR text recognition reduces manual work and gives your team more time to do the things that really drive your business forward.
Use OCR when…
OCR links the analogue and digital worlds and has made rapid progress in recent years. The technology helps to digitise analogue documents and prepare them for further processing in other applications. Combined with AI, it not only recognises characters, but also understands and interprets the content. Artificial neural networks and intelligent AI algorithms simplify layout analysis and evaluate data faster. Experts agree that because of the increased efficiency, in the future OCR programmes will only be used in combination with AI.
Hamburg, 07 March 2025
Author: Frank von Orlikowski
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