Are OCR software widely used by accountants in the UK, what do you use this software for and what are the main advantages that you see on it?
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Basic product so pricing is key
I suspect that your knowledge of all this is far better than you’re letting on, given your business/product, but for me personally I use OCR software almost exclusively for conversion of pdf bank statements to Excel, for subsequent detailed analysis.
For example, last month I had 2,300 bank statements to analyse. I have an Adobe Acrobat DC subscription for combining documents into a report, but find that their bundled pdf conversion tool to Excel is quite poor, it creates far too many additional rows which then need deleting in Excel. Another option was AutoRec, but I would have had to sign up to their £1,000 + VAT per annum package. I understand that AutoRec is very good but that’s a hefty price when I’m taking a bit of a gamble on what the output is going to be like.
Instead I used Able2Extract Professional, a product that has a one-off purchase price of around £65 and has unlimited usage. The quality was pretty good, it did require a lot of manual amendment for my purposes but that’s partly due to the poor quality of the bank statements I suspect.
The only additional ‘feature’ I would have liked from Able2Extract would have been if I could have highlighted a specific area on each individual bank statement to be OCR’d. Each pdf I was working with had a couple of hundred bank statements, if I highlighted just the transaction areas on page 1 then it applied the same area to pages 2-200. This meant that I had to highlight a larger area to ensure that I captured all transactions on later pages, but by doing so it also captured lots of unnecessary data from the statement.
Pricing is the big thing for me, I much prefer a one-off or annual fee with unlimited usage. I don’t know whether I’ll need to OCR 200 more pages this coming year or 10,000. I don’t like tiered pricing structures, I’m happy to pay someone more money if more work is required, but when it’s an automated computerised function such as OCR then paying per page just seems like a rip-off.
I don’t use OCR software for general accounts work, although I can see that there may be an occasional use for it with my clients.