Total Cost of Ownership of an OCR Software

What is TCO (total cost of ownership)?

Total Cost of Ownership

The Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) is a financial estimate intended to help buyers and owners determine the direct and indirect costs of a product or service. It is a management accounting concept that can be used in full cost accounting. (Wikipedia).

TCO is a popular concept when it comes to comparing Software. It allows you to estimate the cost of using the OCR software and plan your automation strategy according to your possible workload and budget over time.

There are several aspects that are too circumstantial to be able to include in general cost estimates, but there are some that we know for a fact, and we can combine them in a total cost of ownership for each OCR scenario and compare them to the possible solutions on the market.

Front-End Cost

The first and most obvious element is front-end cost. This is the price that will be presented with the product, and the marketing team will be pointing towards special offers and discounts to cut it down. It is an important factor, but it is far from everything you would need to take into account. And yet, even here, there are different options. Some of the OCR solutions will offer you the “pay and forget” option of making one payment right here, right now. However, lately, the annual cost or subscription model has become more and more popular, allowing customers to spread costs over time and OCR creators to organize a steady flow of income.

Cost of Support and Maintenance

The second element of the total cost of ownership would be the cost of support and maintenance. Theoretically, it is possible to avoid […]

OCR Guide

What is OCR?

OCR stands for Optical Character Recognition and is the technology that allows software to interpret text on scanned images. When this technology is applied to automating business data entry processes it’s referred to as OCR Data Capture.

Many are familiar with popular desktop OCR applications designed to convert scanned images to editable documents. When this process is applied to specific areas of the document containing data fields it’s called zone OCR. But OCR data capture software is more than just simple zone OCR. Modern applications use some or all of these technologies:

Handprint recognition (ICR or Intelligent Character Recognition) for forms processing.
Advanced rules-based templates for locating common data elements on pages with different layouts and formatting.
Artificial intelligence that is able to use point and click user feedback to train recognition templates automatically.
Natural language processing is able to interpret paragraphs of text and extract meaningful data from them.
Robotic process automation puts back office integration into the hands of power users instead of programmers.
Preconfigured form templates and business rules for common applications like invoice processing and healthcare claim forms.

80%

Using the OCR software enables enterprises to reduce the document processing time by as much as 80%

Benefits of using OCR

If not for the trees then do it for the savings on paper, toner, copiers and their services contracts, etc.

How much time is wasted searching for paper files? Digital documents can searched and viewed instantly from anywhere.

Paper is much harder to backup and restore than digital data.

Office square footage and off-site records storage adds to the cost of keeping paper documents.

Government mandates for records retention […]

PDF Processing with FineReader and FineReader Server

How to create a PDF from Microsoft® Word, Excel, or PowerPoint

How to convert emails to PDF

How to Split a PDF

Create new PDF documents or separate PDF documents combined in one easily with FineReader PDF 15.

Learn how to split PDFs and extract pages easily.

How to create and edit interactive PDF forms

Watch this video and see how to edit and create interactive PDF forms quickly and easily.

Form Editor tool in FineReader PDF 15 allows creating and editing fillable PDF forms with text and date fields, dropdown lists, list boxes, checkmarks, radio buttons, signature fileds and action buttons. Collect information and create effective document templates with ease!

How to extract text from scanned PDFs

How to extract tables

How can I verify if the digital signature is valid?

If you open a document with a valid digital signature in FineReader, you will see a green notification Valid on the left panel of ABBYY FineReader PDF 15:

Recognizing a document with existing text layer in FineReader PDF 15

Open FineReader PDF 15;
Go to Tools > Options > OCR;
In the PDF recognition mode select Use OCR option:
Click OK;
Recognize your document again.

How to convert a document into an accessible PDF/UA

Make your mixed documents—PDF, scanned, photographed, or papers— digital and accessible.

In this […]

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:

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

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 […]

FlexiCapture and Vantage Natural Language Processing (NLP)

How to train NLP machine learning model

Today different industries face similar challenges as they seek to extract information from business documents, such as policies, e-mails and legal agreements – and most agree that is costly, time consuming and prone to errors with manual data entry.

In this video you will learn how to train NLP machine learning model in FlexiCapture to extract entities and text passages from Lease agreements.

Converting unstructured documents into structured data automatically makes this information available to your business applications while saving you time, money, and labor in the process.

Adding a field which is captured by flexilayout to a NLP-trained Document Definition

You can add the new flexible layout as additional layout to the existing one.
To do that, please open the Document Definition Editor, go to the Section’s properties and load the new layout as additional FlexiLayout.

Catherine2022-06-21T14:38:46-04:00Tags: AI Classification, AI OCR Training, Artificial Intelligence, Automate Data Entry, Data Capture, Data Extraction, Electronic Data Capture, Extract Text from Image, Machine Learning, NLP, OCR Solution, OCR Text, OCR Training, PDF Text Extraction, Robotic Process Automation, RPA, Text Recognition|

Amazon Textract API

Automatically extract handwriting, plain text or form data from any document using the world’s largest OCR machine learning model based on billions of sample documents.

Amazon Textract is a cloud OCR service that automatically detects and extracts text and data from scanned documents and PDF files. It goes beyond simple optical character recognition (OCR) to also identify the contents of fields in forms and information stored in tables.

Amazon Textract API also lets you implement OCR in your RPA workflows. UiPath and other bots offer connectors that let you include Textract OCR into your RPA process.

Textract is not a “ready-to-use” product. It requires programing skills, experience with AWS systems and decent amount of coding to implement it into your systems, especially once you add user interfaces for scanning and data validation.

Simple Software developers have the necessary skills and experience to integrate Textract into your custom applications. Contact us or click the Request a Quote button to get a proposal for your custom application development project.

Simple Software also offers the ready-to-use SimpleIndex application that incorporates Textract into a fully-featured scanning, indexing and document processing application.

You can learn more about Amazon Textract into SimpleIndex here.

ABBYY Cloud OCR SDK

ABBYY® Cloud OCR SDK is a web-based document processing service that will enhance your enterprise software systems, SaaS platforms, or your mobile apps with the ability to convert documents and utilize textual information from scans, PDFs, document images, smartphone photos, or screenshots.

Combining ABBYY’s latest AI-based technologies for information extraction with the highly scalable processing power of the Microsoft® Azure® computing infrastructure, this secure and reliable ABBYY cloud service can be easily integrated into your application via a REST API—empowering it to precisely convert virtually any number of pages within the shortest amount of time.

Tungsten Kofax OmniPage Server On-Premise

Tungsten Kofax OmniPage Server turns OmniPage into a true server-based OCR solution that is scalable to any volume by load-balancing across multiple servers. OmniPage Server is perfect for high-volume conversion projects or for distributing OCR throughout the enterprise.

SimpleIndex Pro Server 1M PPY

SimpleIndex Pro Server 1 million pages per year – ABBYY FineReader OCR Server, Accusoft Barcode Engine 1D/2D Client, DTK Barcode Engine 1D/2D Server & ISIS Scanning

Document capture solution with a one-click interface that automates your scanning and document filing by creating easy-to-find electronic content, saving you time and money. It’s highly customizable to meet even the most detailed needs, with top quality technicians to support your requirements.

Demos and Additional Materials

SimpleIndex OCR Workstation

Document capture solution with a one-click interface that automates your scanning and document filing by creating easy-to-find electronic content, saving you time and money. It’s highly customizable to meet even the most detailed needs, with top quality technicians to support your requirements.

SimpleIndex OCR Workstation version
Includes:

basic text and barcode recognition,
ABBYY FineReader OCR Client,
TWAIN and ISIS scanning
1 Year Support & Upgrades

Demos and Additional Materials

Why are the prices of OCR applications so different?

OCR software ranges in price from freeware all the way up to tens of thousands of dollars. What explains the difference between these applications? Here’s the breakdown:

OCR Freeware uses the SimpleOCR or Tesseract engines and provide limited scanning and output format capabilities. Recognition quality is generally poor except for the highest quality document images.
PDF OCR Converters provide good quality OCR engines like ABBYY, IRIS and OmniPage, but limit the output to searchable PDF files. These cost less than $100.
Standard OCR applications range from $100-$200 and provide full OCR capabilities including converting scans to Word, Excel, HTML and other editable formats.
Corporate OCR applications add advanced features like automated hotfolder processing, concurrent licensing and other features useful for business applications. Pricing for these is $200-$500.
OCR Servers provide scalable, enterprise OCR services for processing very high volumes of documents or providing OCR capabilities to users throughout the organization. Prices start around $1,500 and go up based on processing volume.
Enterprise Data Capture and Forms Processing applications are used to capture structured data from complex documents like healthcare claim forms and invoices that include things like tables, handwriting, checkboxes, and movable zones. These solutions can cost anywhere from around $1,000 to hundreds of thousands of dollars depending on the document volume and complexity of the project.

aaron2021-01-24T18:39:02-05:00Tags: Accounts Payable Automation, Accounts Payable OCR, AP Invoice Scanning, Automate Data Entry, Barcode OCR, Batch OCR, Batch OCR PDF, Best OCR Software for Handwriting, Convert Images to Searchable PDF, Convert Images to Word, Convert PDF to Editable Word, Convert PDF to Excel, Convert PDF to HTML, Convert PDF to Text, Convert Picture to Text, Data Capture, Data Extraction, Document Management, Document Processing Software, Extract Text from Image, Forms Processing, Handprint Recognition, ICR, Image Recognition, Invoice Automation Software, Invoice Capture, Invoice Imaging, Invoice OCR, Invoice Recognition, Invoice Scanning Software, Invoice Workflow Software, OCR Accuracy, OCR Character Recognition, OCR Invoice Processing, OCR PDF, OCR Scanner, Optical Character Recognition, PDF Data Extraction, PDF OCR, Scan Invoice, Server OCR, Simple Invoice Software, Text Recognition|

Can OCR be trained for specific fonts?

OCR training was once a critical part of the conversion process. After a document was read, the operator would review the results to correct mistaken characters and these corrections would be used to train the engine so the next time you read a similar document the results are improved.

Modern OCR applications no longer rely on user training for accuracy unless you have very non-standard fonts. These engines have had decades of development and billions of samples used to train their algorithms. In most cases, the introduction of user training will only diminish the results for any documents that are different than the ones being trained.

The training functions still exist for these edge cases, but they are no longer an integral part of the OCR process.

Training in modern OCR is more likely to refer to enterprise data capture applications that use AI-based learning algorithms to find the locations of data points on documents with various different formats, such as invoices.

aaron2021-01-24T18:39:27-05:00Tags: Artificial Intelligence, OCR Accuracy, OCR Character Recognition, OCR Text, OCR Training, Optical Character Recognition, Text Recognition|

Knowledge Base

The SimpleOCR Knowledge Base contains frequently asked questions and answers, technical guides and general information on a broad range of optical character recognition, handprint recognition, data capture, PDF OCR, AP invoice scanning and zone OCR applications.

Contact Us for FREE Consultation on Your OCR Project

aaron2022-06-16T17:40:53-04:00Tags: Accounts Payable Automation, Accounts Payable OCR, AI Classification, AP Invoice Scanning, Automate Data Entry, Automated Invoice Processing Software, Automatic Classification, Automatic Document Separation, Batch OCR, Batch OCR PDF, Batch OCR Software, Best OCR Software for Handwriting, Check Mark Recognition, Checkbox Recognition, Convert Handprint to Text, Convert Images to Searchable PDF, Convert Images to Word, Convert PDF to Editable Word, Convert PDF to Text, Cursive Handwriting Recognition, Data Capture, Data Extraction, Electronic Data Capture, Handprint Recognition, Handwriting Recognition, ICR, Invoice Automation Software, Invoice Capture, Invoice Imaging, Invoice OCR, Invoice Recognition, Invoice Scanning Software, Invoice Workflow Software, Knoxville TN OCR Solutions, OCR Character Recognition, OCR Invoice Processing, OCR PDF, OCR Scanner, OMR, Optical Character Recognition, Optical Mark Recognition, PDF Converters, PDF Data Extraction, PDF OCR, PDF Text Extraction, PDF to TXT Converter, Read Handwriting, Receipt Scanning, Scan Handwriting to Text, Scan Invoice, Scan to Excel, Scantron, Server OCR, Simple Invoice Software, Test Scanning, Text Recognition|

Tungsten Kofax OmniPage – Ultimate

Tungsten Kofax OmniPage Ultimate has several unique features that make it stand out for a variety of applications. Some of these include auto-redaction, SharePoint integration, automatic filing with barcodes, PDF auto-bookmarking, form data collection and MFP support. Most of these new features are not available in the Standard edition.

Tungsten Kofax OmniPage – Standard

Tungsten Kofax OmniPage Standard converts paper, picture, and PDF files into editable documents to save you considerable time and money by eliminating retyping. Your documents look just like the original – complete with text, tables, and graphics. OmniPage uses superior character accuracy to precisely format your documents so you can easily make changes.

ABBYY FineReader Server On-Premise

ABBYY FineReader Server On-Premise

Innovative server-based OCR software for performing centralized enterprise-wide OCR processing. Allows anyone on the network to submit files for OCR. Complex XML job specifications can be submitted to control output. Support available for Arabic and Asian languages.

Available in CPU, Total Page Count and Pages Per Year licensing models.

ABBYY FineReader PDF 15 Corporate, 1 Year Subscription

ABBYY FineReader PDF 15 Corporate, (1 Year Subscription) is an all-in-one business toolset for working with PDFs and document digitization. With FineReader PDF employees can work with both digitally created and scanned paper documents to fulfill various document-related tasks in the digital workplace effortlessly. ABBYY FineReader PDF 15 Corporate allows you to view, edit, search, comment and collaborate, sign and protect PDFs or compare document versions in different file formats to identify differences efficiently. Thanks to the seamlessly integrated AI-based OCR technology with FineReader you can also extract information from a PDF or convert the entire document to Word, Excel® for further editing. Document conversion can also be automated to prepare multiple documents for further processing.

Demo and Additional Materials

ABBYY FineReader PDF 15 Standard, 1 Year Subscription

ABBYY FineReader PDF 15 Standard, (1 Year Subscription) is a PDF software application for working with PDF documents and scans. Powered by ABBYY’s AI-based OCR technology it allows you to convert and edit not only digital PDF documents, but also scanned paper documents with the same ease-of-use. With FineReader PDF you can view, edit, search, comment, sign, protect, extract text from PDFs and convert documents into Word, Excel® for further editing.

Demo and Additional Materials

Convert Scanned Image to Text Document

The primary purpose of Optical Character Recognition is to quickly and automatically convert scanned images of machine-printed (typed) text – which to a computer are no more meaningful a collection of pixels than any other image, such as a landscape photo – into actual text data that you can search through and modify.

OCR Software comes in many different types, which vary in price range based on their features, speed, and accuracy. One of the main qualities that OCR producers are using to differentiate their products is volume of the documents OCR will allow you to process. That may be a bit counter intuitive but features that are needed to process hundreds, thousands or millions pages a year are rather different ones.

In case of several hundreds of pages (receipts, checks, medical, tax or legal forms, personal memorabilia) you need to scan for personal use you would need light, highly versatile, easy to use, not expensive software that will convert images just to text. It may not have automation features, and processing data further will be done manually by you. Thou it is not too hard since volume of documents is not very large and you can treat each of them individually.

Small business users usually process thousands of pages a year and require some automation features. Images need to be converted not just to text, but also to spreadsheets to be processed further. Once the system is set up it is assumed that it will run without much of the interference, and people in charge of document processing would be able to do that with certain ease.

Larger companies processing millions of documents require much larger levels of automation when each small, fine tuned feature would save thousands of work hours in a long run. Multiple machines will be processing documents […]

OCR Freeware

About SimpleOCR Freeware

Do you dread having to retype that document you are holding in your hand? If only you had the electronic file, your life would be so much easier. With SimpleOCR, you could easily and accurately convert that paper document into editable electronic text for use in any application including Word and WordPerfect.

Not only is SimpleOCR up to 99% accurate, it is 100% free.

Download SimpleOCR now or learn more its feature and functions.

Accuracy

With optical character recognition up to 99% accurate, there is no better OCR application for the price. This increased accuracy greatly reduces the need for post-recognition proof reading and correction. And after all, isn’t that why you want to OCR the document in the first place? Of course it is!

System Requirements

SimpleOCR works on any version of windows, from Windows 95-10 and beyond! Your scanner need only a TWAIN driver, the driver that comes with a majority of all scanners sold. In short, SimpleOCR will most likely work with the PC and scanner you already have.

Pricing

SimpleOCR is free for all commercial and non-commercial purposes. It may be re-distributed freely, but only in its original, unaltered form.

Download SimpleOCR Now

Huge Dictionary – With more than 120,000 words, it is unlikely that SimpleOCR will run into a word it does not know. In the rare event that it does, our improved text editor allows you to easily add the new word to the dictionary. By adding new words to the dictionary, SimpleOCR becomes better with every use.
Attention! SimpleOCR does NOT have any handprint OCR capabilities, it will not be able to recognize handwritten text. ICR (Intelligent Character Recognition) is rather complicated software usually on a more expensive side.
Despeckle – For those documents which are not […]

Text Recognition

What is TCO (total cost of ownership)?

Total Cost of Ownership

Front-End Cost

Cost of Support and Maintenance

What is OCR?

Benefits of using OCR

If not for the trees then do it for the savings on paper, toner, copiers and their services contracts, etc.

How much time is wasted searching for paper files? Digital documents can searched and viewed instantly from anywhere.

Paper is much harder to backup and restore than digital data.

Office square footage and off-site records storage adds to the cost of keeping paper documents.

Government mandates for records retention […]

ICR – Intelligent Character Recognition

Intelligent Character Recognition

ICR in ABBYY SDKs

Contact Us for FREE Consultation on Your OCR Project

Larger companies processing millions of documents require much larger levels of automation when each small, fine tuned feature would save thousands of work hours in a long run. Multiple machines will be processing documents […]

About SimpleOCR Freeware

Not only is SimpleOCR up to 99% accurate, it is 100% free.

Download SimpleOCR now or learn more its feature and functions.

Accuracy

System Requirements

SimpleOCR works on any version of windows, from Windows 95-10 and beyond! Your scanner need only a TWAIN driver, the driver that comes with a majority of all scanners sold. In short, SimpleOCR will most likely work with the PC and scanner you already have.

Pricing

SimpleOCR is free for all commercial and non-commercial purposes. It may be re-distributed freely, but only in its original, unaltered form.

Attention! SimpleOCR does NOT have any handprint OCR capabilities, it will not be able to recognize handwritten text. ICR (Intelligent Character Recognition) is rather complicated software usually on a more expensive side.

Despeckle – For those documents which are not […]

Title