OCR and Why It Matters To Your Business

As a modern entrepreneur, it’s important to stay on top of today’s technology that could potentially help make running your business easier. You’ve heard the buzzwords OCR, automation, machine learning, and AI over and over, but how do these things actually affect your business?

At TrulySmall, we’re always looking for ways to improve our apps so that they continue to make your life easier. Let us help demystify some of these modern tech solutions and show you how they can make running your business THAT much smoother!

What is OCR?

OCR, or Optical Character Recognition, is just a fancy way of saying text recognition. OCR software is able to scan, read, and parse documents. It helps to extract and repurpose data from photos, PDFs, or scanned documents. Sometimes, OCR will take advantage of smarter artificial intelligence to do more with the data. It’s an efficient tool that could help businesses save time, cost, and other resources by utilizing automated data extraction.

How does OCR help my business?

In the accounting and financial world, OCR is often used for reading financial documents such as receipts and invoices. This means you can take a picture of a receipt or invoice document and the software will automatically extract the data, store it, and even complete a financial task with it.

How TrulySmall uses OCR

For example, TrulySmall Accounting allows you to upload images of receipts or invoices, and will then read and extract all the information it needs to automatically create a transaction entry. This eliminates the need for you to copy and enter data on your own, and risk wrong information being entered due to human error! Not only does this save you time, but it also allows you to have peace of mind that all of your data has been verified by a system and entered correctly.

The added benefit of importing your expense receipts this way is that we also allow you to store the digital copy of the receipt in our cloud storage. You can then access that digital copy from anywhere, on any device. Having digital copies of your receipts instead of trying to keep and organize physical copies, gives you peace of mind come tax season.

No one likes the stress and anxiety of filing taxes. Knowing you have physical copies of all your receipts ensures that you’re always ready if your business is ever audited.

Other OCR tools that are helpful for small businesses

Another great way you can utilize OCR for your business is by using an OCR document editor. These tools allow you to scan and copy entire paper documents so that you can save them digitally or even edit them and add additional data. This could be helpful for digitizing any historical paper documents or even making adjustments to old records. Step away from keeping paper copies of everything and start saving space and time by digitizing your documents and files!

Make your business smarter and easier to run!

Using the right technology can make your job easier and your life more stress-free. Check out our suite of financial apps that were built to do just that. Want to start utilizing OCR for your accounting and bookkeeping process? Start using TrulySmall Accounting and stop worrying about manual transaction entry and keeping track of all your receipts! Try TrulySmall Accounting for 14 days, completely free!