The best software to create forms is the software that automates their data entry, no matter how they are filled out. Our forms processing applications contain design tools that optimize recognition accuracy and generate recognition templates automatically.

Best software to create formsPaper forms that will be filled out by hand should be designed with ICR handprint recognition in mind. This means following recommended form layout guidelines such as creating segmented letter blocks, adequate spacing between fields, color drop-out, anchors for image alignment, and others.

The best software to create forms will:

  • Enforce best practices for form design
  • Create clean print forms that are optimized for ICR
  • Output forms as fillable PDF files that can be emailed or posted online
  • Create data capture templates for recognizing scanned forms
  • Integrate with web forms for online data collection
  • Collect data from web, PDF and paper and aggregate it in one database
  • Provide built-in reporting tools or integrate with popular BI tools

Simple Software has the best software to create forms and read them with OCR, OMR and ICR.ABBYY FlexiCapture OCR Data Capture and Forms Processing

  • See all of our Forms Processing Software here
  • Use SimpleIndex to automatically fill in or read data from PDF forms. It only works with PDF forms but it’s significantly easier, faster and less expensive than other platforms.
  • The SimpleIndex Cloud OCR option adds Amazon Textract forms extraction capabilities that provide very accurate machine and handprint recognition, even with unconstrained writing.
  • Use Remark Office OMR to quickly create machine-readable forms that use checkmark recognition to improve the speed and accuracy of data collection. OCR and handprint recognition fields can be enabled using Microsoft Azure cloud OCR. Built-in reporting lets you visualize the results without third-party BI tools.
  • The ABBYY FlexiCapture platform is the most robust solution for enterprise data capture. It has the most complete tools for form design, the most accurate OCR engine, and is scalable to meet the needs of the largest scanning projects.
  • Digitech Systems PaperVision document management platform includes integrated e-Forms creation, data collection and archiving. Users can easily create, publish and securely distribute e-forms using the PaperVision website. Use it with PaperVision Capture Forms Magic to scan and read data from paper forms and archive it all in one place.

Cloud OCR vs Sunshine OCR


VS.

Cloud OCRWith the development of Cloud Computing, more and more OCR solutions started to move processing to the cloud. There are several major Cloud OCR solutions like AWS Textract (from Amazon), Azure AI Vision (from Microsoft), Google Cloud Vision AI, as well as more specialized solutions like ABBYY Vantage.

These days it is much harder to find an OCR data capture solution that is not fully or partly cloud-based.

Sunshine OCR, On Premise OCR,Sunshine Software or Sunshine OCR refers to on-premise Optical Character Recognition software that requires no internet connection to operate. Since there is no Cloud involved, we are calling it Sunshine Software to shine a light on the advantages of avoiding the Cloud.

We call it “Sunshine” because it’s catchy and makes us smile. But also because there is no good marketing term for this type of software. Before the “Cloud” became popular, it was known as simply as “Software.” After the development of Cloud Computing, it has been referred to as On-Prem, On-Premise, On-Site, Offline, Local, Native, Self-Hosted, In-House and other terms, but none of them highlight the benefits it has over the Cloud like Sunshine Software.

Cloud OCR or Sunshine OCR?

Cloud OCRIn the ever-evolving landscape of technology, businesses are faced with critical decisions regarding the deployment of software. Two prominent models, cloud-based and sunshine-based (on-premise) software, offer distinct approaches to meeting organizational needs. Understanding the differences between these models is essential for making informed decisions aligned with business goals and requirements.

Key Characteristics

Cloud-Based OCR Software:

Cloud OCR software operates on remote servers accessible over the internet. This model offers unparalleled scalability, allowing businesses to […]

Aviation and Marine Fuel Invoices

Aviation and Marine fuel invoice processing has a number of data capture and normalization requirements that make them very hard to automate without specialized knowledge and customized business rules.

Our team has implemented aviation, marine, and land fuel transportation invoice automation projects, with some of the top global energy services companies. We have extensive knowledge of these types of invoices and the way that they need to be processed to ensure that the myriad of taxes and fees are captured and applied to the correct fueling.

What Makes Aviation and Marine Invoice Processing So Complex?

  • Multiple taxes from multiple jurisdictions apply to each transaction. Excise tax, Environmental tax, LUST tax, VAT, etc.
  • Additional fees like Airport, Storage, Intoplane, Flowage, Fuel Surcharge, etc.
  • Different vendors use different descriptions for each tax and fee.
  • Invoices with multiple itemized fuel transactions but a single summary of taxes and fees that must be applied to each fueling proportionally.
  • Sometimes the same data appears in the header, and other times in the line items, sub-tables, or footers.
  • Aviation and Marine are international businesses, so handling multiple languages and currencies, exchange rate calculation, and currency conversions must be performed.
  • Since the price of fuel changes constantly, slight changes must be accommodated within acceptable tolerance.

Achieving Total Automation

Other invoice solutions capture data only as it appears on the invoice. While some normalization or mapping to known item IDs can be done, it is rare that the data can be imported and matched to a fuel order without additional manual steps. Unless the data being imported matches the expected data line by line, someone must manually reconcile the differences.

When orders are placed for a single uplift, but the vendor sends a daily or weekly […]

Digitech Systems OCR

Digitech Systems creates an award-winning digitization and content management software and cloud services that deliver Any Document, Anywhere, Anytime®, organizations of all sizes now securely and effectively extract, manage and automate their business information.

The PaperVision and ImageSilo brands are used by thousands of businesses worldwide from global conglomerates to Main Street to help teams pave the path to more meaningful work by transforming how they handle digital files, processes, documents, and more.

Starting with PaperFlow digitization software, subsequent years brought on-premise information management (PaperVision Enterprise, 1998), the world’s first cloud Enterprise Content Management system (ImageSilo, 1999), business process automation (PaperVision Enterprise WorkFlow, 2002), intelligent data capture (PaperVision Capture, 2009), and AI-enabled forms processing (PaperVision Forms Magic™, 2016). The PaperVision®.com cloud-based information management system was introduced in 2020. These products provide unprecedented ease-of-use and architectural flexibility, while balancing fully featured products with a sensible price/performance ratio and legendary customer service.

PaperVision Enterprise performs dependable electronic document management to automate office environments, conserve paper, time, money, and provide peace of mind. Retrieval solutions provide enterprise scalability and functionality with advanced features that enhance your efficiency and protect corporate data. Electronic information is retrieved instantly with our user-friendly graphical interface that displays a complete overview of all your available projects. View, manipulate, print, fax, export, and e-mail documents directly from your PC. On-premise installation or cloud hosted services available.

PaperVision Direct Scan, import, index, and organize paper documents using your existing scanners and multi-function devices (MFD) to create convenient digital files and securely upload them to the cloud. Start scanning documents right at your desk! Turn any vulnerable paper document into a useful digital file that can be securely managed in your PaperVision.com cloud service.

PaperVision Capture Forms Magic adds handwriting […]

How to configure a Batch Splitting step to split on a blank value

In PaperVision Capture a batch splitting step can be configured to meet one or more of many conditions. In some cases it may be desirable to split a batch based off a blank value within an index field. This can be achieved by using a String Comparison or Regular Expression.

The following steps should be used to configure batch splitting using a blank value. Note: These steps assume you will be splitting the batch based on an index field called “ExampleIndexField”. The index field should already exist in the job.

To split the batch on a blank value using the String Comparison type:

  1. Setup the Target Job Configuration.
  2. Add a batch split step.
  3. Add a New Condition.
    • The condition source: Capture Index
    • Choose Capture Index: “ExampleIndexField”
    • Choose Comparison Type: String Comparison
    • Leave the drop down on the equal sign “=” and leave the text box, blank.
    • Click Finish
  4. The condition should read (CI.ExampleIndexField = “”)

 

To split the batch on a blank value using the Regular Expression Comparison type:

  1. Setup the Target Job Configuration.
  2. Add a batch split step.
  3. Add a New Condition
    • The condition source: Capture Index
    • Choose Capture Index: “ExampleIndexField”
    • Choose Comparison Type: Regular Expression
    • Input the Regular Expression which represents any blank space characters: ^\s*$
    • Click Finish
  4. The condition should read (CI.ExampleIndexField RegEx.Match(“^\s*$”)

Grooper Document Processing

Grooper was built from the ground up by BIS, a company with 35 years of continuous experience developing and delivering new technology. Grooper is an intelligent document processing and digital data integration solution that empowers organizations to extract meaningful information from paper/electronic documents and other forms of unstructured data.

The platform combines patented and sophisticated image processing, capture technology, machine learning, natural language processing, and optical character recognition to enrich and embed human comprehension into data. By tackling tough challenges that other systems cannot resolve, Grooper has become the foundation for many industry-first solutions in healthcare, financial services, oil and gas, education, and government.

  • Single platform
  • Patented OCR
  • Image processing
  • Machine learning
  • Natural language processing
  • Zero code
  • Zero templates
  • Open architecture

Reading Handprint, Checkmarks, and Forms with FlexiCapture and Vantage

ICR – Intelligent Character Recognition

Intelligent Character Recognition

  • Intelligent Character Recognition (ICR) is an extended technology of the optical character recognition (OCR ). While the OCR technology is designed to extract machine-printed characters, the ICR technology retreives information provided as hand-printed characters
  • The ICR technology can extract hand-printed characters that are separated and written as individualcharacters in areas/zones – these areas/zones needs to be specified as fixed fields of a machine readable forms. Alternativelly, they need to be automatically detected.

Example of a form containing hand-printed characters:

icr-form-illu.png

Important note: ICR is not able to extract texts in “cursive handwriting” as in this example:

old-handwriting-illu.png

  • In most cases, the ICR technology is linked to Field Level / Zonal Recognition and forms processing.
  • To enhance the ICR recognition accuracy, it is recommended to use meta data, for example regular expressions, dictionaries or database lookups.

ICR in ABBYY SDKs

The following ABBYY SDKs and products support ICR

  • FineReader Engine
    Since the version 12, Release 3, ICR is as well included in the Linux version. Since the Release 4 of the version 12, it is as well included in the Mac version of FineReader Engine (in lower versions, the ICR technology was only supported in the Windows version.
  • FlexiCapture SDK – this SDK is designed for forms processing and data extraction, ICR and template matching for fixed forms are part of the default feature set. In addition, ABBYY offers this technology as a product in form of the FlexiCapture platform.
  • Cloud OCR SDK – the ABBYY OCR service, allows reading zones that contain hand-printed, separated characters. This online OCR service […]

ABBYY Vantage

ABBYY Vantage leverages AI machine learning and a huge library of document “skills” to provide out-of-the-box data capture for all kinds of documents.

Vantage provides a simple way to implement new data capture processes without the need for programmers.

It takes the FlexiCapture platform, hosts it in the cloud, and dramatically simplifies the interface. The thousands of settings you can use with FlexiCapture to build templates are managed by the AI, giving you a simple point and click interface to create new document capture workflows.

The “Skills” library gives you pre-configured capture workflows for hundreds of the most common documents. Simply connect them to your import and export destinations and you are ready to go, saving you hours or even days of development time.

PaperVision Capture Forms Magic

PaperVision Capture Forms Magic adds handwriting recognition, forms processing, invoice processing or healthcare claims forms templates and business rules to their high-volume document scanning and data capture platform.

PaperVision Enterprise (Cloud or On-Premise)

PAPERVISION performs dependable electronic document management to automate office environments, conserve paper, time, money, and provide peace of mind. Retrieval solutions provide enterprise scalability and functionality with advanced features that enhance your efficiency and protect corporate data.

Electronic information is retrieved instantly with our user-friendly graphical interface that displays a complete overview of all your available projects. View, manipulate, print, fax, export, and e-mail documents directly from your PC.

On-premise installation or cloud hosted services available.

OCR Consulting Services

OCR Experts for Any Project

Our unique team of OCR experts are equipped to help out with OCR projects of any size or complexity. We have support specialists that can remotely configure desktop solutions in a matter of minutes and expert systems integrators with years of programming, database design, and robotic process automation experience.

Desktop OCR

Batch Document Scanning and OCRUse our online store to order desktop OCR applications and our staff will be happy to answer your setup questions via email or web chat.

Remote configuration and training services using GotoMeeting are available for a low hourly rate.

Batch Scanning & OCR Servers

Data Capture Forms OCRAutomate document scanning and digital document archival processes using zone OCR, barcode recognition, database integration and other technologies.

Small business systems and single document workflows can be setup remotely via GotoMeeting, usually in just a few hours. Chat now if we’re online or leave a message to schedule a consultation.

Data Capture and Forms Processing

Advanced data extraction solutions that can turn the most complex documents into structured data ready for use in business applications. Each member of our data capture consulting team has over 10 years experience designing and implementing advanced OCR solutions.

We are the most experienced system integrator in the US for our flagship data capture platform, ABBYY FlexiCapture. We saw its potential immediately when it was introduced and now over 15 years later it is the leading data capture solution and no team is more experienced than ours at implementing it. We are the ones that other ABBYY integrators call for their most complex implementations.

While we have designed capture solutions for all types of documents, we have particular expertise in the following areas:

    […]

Creating forms optimized for handprint recognition

Handprint recognition applications can provide dramatically different results in terms of accuracy depending on whether the form is designed with intelligent character recognition (ICR) in mind.

Forms Processing applications like ABBYY FlexiCapture have a built-in form design tool with ICR-optimized field layout elements and rules that validate whether your form uses best practices for recognition. These forms can be automatically converted to recognition templates for scanning for data capture. This saves you dozens of hours of trial and error during the design process and even more in data entry once the filled in forms are collected.

Best practice recommendations for ICR and OCR forms include:

  • Plenty of space between form elements and labels, at least 0.5cm / 0.25in
  • Use drop out colors for form backgrounds when possible
  • Hand printed characters should be constrained with boxes or combs to force filler to write legible, separated, printed characters
  • Use check boxes instead of handprint when possible since these are nearly 100% accurate
  • Use numeric codes instead of alphanumeric text when possible to reduce the number of possible characters and increase accuracy
  • Use validation rules to check against possible values and flag data with incorrect values
  • Check box fields can be used to verify the presence of signatures

ABBYY FlexiCapture Cloud

ABBYY FlexiCapture Cloud

ABBYY FlexiCapture Cloud delivers ABBYY’s advanced data capture platform capabilities via REST API and web interfaces. ABBYY FlexiCapture Cloud customers can rapidly configure and deliver their Content IQ solution, taking advantage of our cloud services to automate and accelerate their document-driven processes. The advanced machine learning and AI in the platform improve classification and data extraction results, enabling core processes to support better, smarter, faster decisions.

FlexiCapture Cloud enables organizations to accelerate digital transformation by complementing their automation systems with new and advanced cognitive capabilities that liberate the intelligence locked in their documents.

ABBYY FlexiCapture On-Premise

ABBYY FlexiCapture On-Premise – Distributed – Perpetual License PPY 50K Pages

ABBYY FlexiCapture is a powerful data capture and document processing solution from a world-leading technology vendor. It is designed to transform streams of documents of any structure and complexity into business-ready data. And its award-winning recognition technologies, automatic document classification, plus a highly scalable and customizable architecture, mean that it can help companies and organizations of any size to streamline their business processes, increase efficiency and reduce costs.

Handprint Recognition Guide

What is ICR, Handprint Recognition?

ICR stands for Intelligent Character Recognition and is the technology that allows software to interpret hand printed text on scanned images.

Forms Processing Software uses ICR technology to automate data entry tasks involving hand-filled surveys, applications and forms. It provides interfaces for scanning, recognition, data verification and export, as well as management and monitoring tools to track large volumes of documents and data through the workflow.

Forms Processing also includes OCR (Optical Character Recognition) technology to recognize machine printed text, and OMR (Optical Mark Recognition) for check boxes and multiple choice bubbles.

Traditional forms processing relies on constrained handwriting, where boxes on the form force the filler to write with separated, printed block characters. Modern AI technology has dramatically improved the ability to recognized unconstrained handwriting and cursive script. Hand printed notes, free-form comments blocks, non-segmented fields, historic documents, and more can now be converted to text with acceptable accuracy where these were impossible just a few years ago.

Who can benefit from handwritten recognition software?

Any organization that collects data on paper-based forms, surveys or applications on a regular basis can get a very high return on investment by automating the data entry with forms processing software.

You do need to have a significant number of forms to justify the expense, at least a hundred forms per month or more depending on how much data is being captured. If the data entry task can be done in under 25 working hours then it is probably not a good candidate for automation with ICR software.

Organizations that have many separate departments that collect data on forms can share the budget for forms processing software by re-using it for other projects. Your current project […]

HealthCare Claims Forms Processing

Automating Medical Forms with OCR

Perform your claims processing faster, with less errors and effort using OCR.

Once the form is scanned, our software:

  • Electronically isolates and records information provided in the different fields
  • Transfers and fills that information
  • Checks for errors and flags those errors for easy verification.
  • Automatically generates the proper organization and format of the form to meet requirements
  • Accurately submits and stores your claim

By expediting claim processing and increasing accuracy,

you can decrease the overall time it takes to process claims to ensure faster payments.

The open architecture and technology allow for flexibility

to customize and enhance system operations to specifically fit your organization’s unique requirements and easily meet changing healthcare industry standards.

In coordination with our team of experienced professionals,

we can provide the critical expertise and effective ongoing support that you need to succeed in the ever-changing healthcare industry.

Other functions and benefits include:

  • Index forms for instant searching and viewing
  • Reduce the risk of combining redundant member information
  • Customized to specifically fit your company’s requirements
  • Improve exception handling
  • Maintains both professional and institutional claim types with all required information
  • Reduce errors
  • Increase accuracy, productivity, and profitability
  • Predefined templates for fast implementation

The forms CMS 1500 (formerly HCFA 1500) and UB-04 are the most common medical forms used to submit a claim. The form CMS 1500 is the universal claim form used by non-institutional healthcare providers, such as private practices, to bill specific covered services. The form UB-04 is very similar to the CMS 1500, but it is used by institutional healthcare providers, such as hospitals, to submit claims. […]

SimpleOCR | OCR Software Experts

Learn More Download Now

Document Scanners
& Scanner Parts

Accurate OCR starts with quality images. Efficient OCR starts with fast scanning. Find Document Scanners built for OCR at ScanStore.

Our Team of OCR experts is here to help! SimpleOCR is not just Freeware, we have every kind of OCR solution from PDF Converters to Enterprise Data Capture, OCR Servers and Handprint Recognition for Forms and Surveys. Live chat with an OCR specialist now or Contact Us for a consultation on your OCR project.

SimpleOCR is the popular freeware OCR Software with hundreds of thousands of users worldwide. SimpleOCR is also a royalty-free OCR SDK for developers to use in their custom applications.

SimpleIndex is OCR built for business, offering powerful batch scanning, OCR server, and data capture features with a simple user interface and affordable licensing.

If you like free stuff, freeware versions of our SimpleView Document Viewer (with Tesseract OCR), SimpleCoversheet Bar Code Printer, and SimpleExport CSV to XML Converter are also available.

If you have a scanner and want to avoid retyping your documents, SimpleOCR is the fast, free way to do it. The SimpleOCR freeware is 100% free and not limited in any way. Anyone can use SimpleOCR for free–home users, educational institutions, even corporate users.

If your documents have multi-column layouts, non-standard fonts, tables, poor quality or digital camera images, you will not have much success with applications based on free and open source engines like SimpleOCR and Tesseract. You will need a commercial OCR application to get an accurate read. Our OCR Guide compares desktop and server […]

Forms Processing

What is ICR, Survey & Forms Processing?

ICR stands for Intelligent Character Recognition and is the technology that allows software to interpret hand printed text on scanned images.

Data Capture Forms OCRForms Processing Software uses ICR technology to automate data entry tasks involving hand-filled surveys, applications and forms. It provides interfaces for scanning, recognition, data verification and export, as well as management and monitoring tools to track large volumes of documents and data through the workflow.

Forms Processing also includes OCR (Optical Character Recognition) technology to recognize machine printed text, and OMR (Optical Mark Recognition) for check boxes and multiple choice bubbles.

It is also possible to use these applications to automate data collection from PDF forms, Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, and other formats used to fill out forms electronically. Many include the ability to publish forms as paper, fillable PDF and web pages simultaneously to distribute and collect data from multiple sources into one dataset.

Who can benefit from forms processing software?

Any organization that collects data on paper-based forms, surveys or applications on a regular basis can get a very high return on investment by automating the data entry with forms processing software.

You do need to have a significant number of forms to justify the expense– at least a hundred forms per month or more depending on how much data is being captured. If the data entry task can be done in under 100 man-hours then it is not a good candidate for automation with ICR software.

Organizations that have many separate departments that collect data on forms can share the budget for forms processing software by re-using it for other projects. Your current project may not be big enough to justify the expense, but when combined with one or two others it would be.

How much do […]

ABBYY OCR

ABBYY is one of the leading OCR (Optical Character Recognition) companies in a world. They offer a large variety of document capture and automation products starting with FineReader Pro for individual or small business scale companies and FineReader Corporate. If you need to process many thousands or millions of pages, ABBYY has FineReader Server for full-text OCR and FlexiCapture for OCR data capture. Many companies are using their products for its flexibility and scalability, there is always a way to customize ABBYY OCR products to fit your automation needs.

ABBYY FineReader OCR software helps individuals turn scans of paper documents, PDF files, and digital photographs into searchable and editable formats. Unmatched text recognition accuracy and document conversion capabilities virtually eliminate retyping and reformatting. Intuitive use and one-click automated conversion tasks let you do more with this OCR software in fewer steps. Up to 190 languages supported for text recognition and document conversion – absolute record on OCR/PDF software market!

ABBYY FlexiCapture is a powerful data capture and document processing solution. It is designed to transform streams of documents of any structure and complexity into business-ready data.  Solid recognition technologies, automatic document classification and a highly scalable and customizable architecture, will allow it to help companies and organizations of any size to streamline their business processes, increase efficiency and reduce costs.

ABBYY FineReader Server is powerful server-based OCR software for automated document capture and PDF conversion. Designed for mid- to high-volume batch processing, it enables organizations and scanning service providers to establish cost-efficient processes for converting paper, as well as TIFF, JPEG, and PDF image documents into electronic files suitable for full-text search and long-term digital archiving.

ScanStore and SimpleSoftware are highly experienced integrators of ABBYY […]

Compare OCR Software

Applications

When you scan a document that has text or numeric data on it, you are able to read and understand what is written in the scanned image. However, to a computer, the resulting image file is just as meaningless an assortment of pixels as a landscape photo. In order to transform this information into an editable format that you can search through, copy, and modify without retyping it manually, you will need the an Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software.

There is a wide variety of OCR software available. While they all share the ability to convert images of machine printed (not handwritten) text or numbers into an editable format, the various software often have different features, accuracy, prices, and language options.

You can find the various types of OCR software with a description of each below.

Users within a single department, working from home or who have a small business can simply scan their documents to a folder that is shared to everyone. In this “ad-hoc” scenario you only need some basic document scanning software to simplify and bring consistency to your filing system.

If you want to move to the next level, there are Desktop Document Management options that provide an all-in-one means for capture, storage, search and retrieval of documents. Additionally, they provide security, advanced capabilities and ease of use above that of the ad-hoc methods

And let’s not forget cloud-based options that alleviate the need to maintain storage servers or keep software up to date.

Need a simple, no frills OCR solution without spending hundreds of dollars on a professional software package? Look no further. There is a no cost, donation optional, OCR freeware solution […]

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