Working on an Eversource audit in Hartford. Some bills from 2010-2012 are pretty faded photocopies. Anyone have luck with OCR software for extracting data from poor quality utility bills?
OCR software for old bills?
Adobe Acrobat Pro works okay for decent scans. ABBYY FineReader is better for really bad copies but costs more. Sometimes manual entry is faster than fighting with OCR errors.
I've had good luck with TextGrabber on really old bills. Takes photos with your phone and extracts text. Not perfect but better than typing everything.
For really bad copies, sometimes it's worth calling the utility for replacement bills. Most will provide clean copies for a small fee. Saves time versus fighting with OCR.