What is optical character recognition?
Optical character recognition, or OCR, is technology that converts images of text, such as scanned documents, PDFs and phone photos, into machine-readable text that can be searched, copied or fed into other software.
OCR has been around for decades and is built into many scanners, phones and PDF tools. It reads the shapes of letters and numbers in an image and produces text. On a clean, typed page it is very accurate. On faxes, crumpled receipts, handwriting, stamps and multi-column forms, accuracy drops, and errors in numbers are easy to miss.
On its own, OCR gives you text, not meaning. It can tell you a page contains the characters 1,250.00 but not that this is the amount due on an invoice. That is why OCR is usually the first step in a larger process, followed by software or AI that identifies which pieces of text belong in which fields.
If retyping from paper or PDFs is a daily chore, OCR is often the cheapest place to start. Check what your existing tools already do: many document management, accounting and practice management systems include it. Measure accuracy on your real documents, especially the worst-quality ones, and keep a person verifying any figures that end up in financial records.
Example
For example, an auto repair shop that receives parts invoices from several suppliers could scan them with OCR so they become searchable PDFs. The service writer can then find any invoice by part number in seconds instead of digging through folders. Pulling amounts directly into QuickBooks Online would be a further step, with the bookkeeper checking totals before posting.