Got a client with boxes of PSO bills going back to 2018 that need to be digitized. Their old accounting system crashed and they lost all the electronic records. Anyone know of decent free OCR software that can handle utility bill formats? The bills are in pretty good shape but there are hundreds of them.
Free OCR software for old utility bills?
Adobe Acrobat has built-in OCR that works pretty well for utility bills. Not free but most of us already have it. For actual free options, I've had decent luck with ABBYY FineReader Online for small batches. The key is getting good scans - 300 DPI minimum and make sure the bills are straight. Utility bill formats are usually OCR-friendly since they're mostly text and numbers.
I just went through something similar with old OUC bills here in Orlando. Ended up using Google Drive's OCR feature - upload the PDFs and it automatically makes them searchable. Not perfect but caught about 85% of the text correctly. For hundreds of bills, might be worth paying for a proper service like DocParser that's designed for invoice processing.