Working on a historical audit going back to 2015 and the client only has paper bills. Need OCR software that can handle utility bill formats reasonably well. Georgia Power bills have a lot of tables and numbers that need to be accurate. ABBYY FineReader any good? Adobe Acrobat's OCR seems hit or miss with utility formatting.
Best OCR software for scanning old utility bills?
Ray, I've had decent luck with ABBYY for Avista bills. The table recognition is pretty good but you still need to QC everything. For older bills with faded printing, sometimes the manual entry is faster than fixing OCR errors. What's the volume you're dealing with?
About 300 bills total across 8 accounts. Mix of Georgia Power and Municipal Electric Authority bills. The MEA ones are especially challenging because they use a weird format. Might be worth paying someone to key them in manually at this point.
For what it's worth, Chugach Electric bills scan terribly with any OCR. Something about their font choice. I ended up using a combination of OCR for the easy stuff and manual entry for the rate schedule details. Tedious but necessary for accuracy.
Have you considered hiring a virtual assistant for data entry? I found someone in the Philippines who specializes in utility bill processing. Costs about $8/hour and they're very accurate. For 300 bills might be more cost effective than software licensing plus your time to fix OCR errors.