In the article below, we will show you how you can increase your operational efficiency, reduce human error through increased accuracy, lower your current costs, maximize your office space, maintain data integrity and improve data security.
We show you the advantages of a document management system such as PaperOffice AI and how using a DMS can help you cut your costs significantly.
We also explain what regular expressions (regex) are and list concrete REGEX application examples in the second part of this article.
You'll learn how they can help you extract the data you need from your documents quickly, efficiently, and without manually entering that data.
Three magic letters technique - OCR
What does OCR actually mean and what is it used for?
Optical character recognition (OCR) is now widely used to extract information from various documents, such as receipts, to digitize physical paper documents and streamline document management workflow.
The use of OCR text recognition gives companies a huge advantage as it can help automate document processing, a process that plays a significant role in any industry.
OCR, short for Optical Character Recognition, allows a software product to recognize and extract text from a digital image. It is essential for reading and analyzing scanned documents, for example.
While receipt OCR is handy when businesses deal with batches of receipts on a daily basis, an OCR receipt scanner alone is not enough to provide sufficiently accurate results.
A document management system should be used for this, which already has an extensive OCR function on board as standard, such as PaperOffice AI.
PaperOffice AI automatically reads every new document in the workspace with AI OCR in more than 120 languages, makes the entire text content full-text searchable and, with semantic search, also finds documents whose exact wording you do not know. Without any work!
Advantages of digitization
Almost everyone who has dealt with the topic of cost reduction in a company has certainly dealt with the technical term "digitization".
Typically, all of the company's receipts are kept in one place. The processing of the documents will only start after a few days. Digitizing them manually involves locating the relevant information, entering it into a spreadsheet, checking that the entries are correct, before moving on to the next, until you've finally digitized stacks of invoices and other documents.
You may even need to take an extra step to upload the spreadsheet to different systems for operational or accounting purposes.
Sounds awful, right?
With a document management system that already has automated text recognition on board, you can reduce the process from hours or even days to just a few minutes.
After setting up the template and the desired specific data fields, the information is extracted from individual documents or document batches.
Extensive document information is stored accordingly, the document is tagged and, thanks to the information read out, can be automatically linked to a stored contact if required.
All you have to do is get your documents into PaperOffice AI – scanned, or just as they arrive digitally – via the app, scanner, email, connector or API.
The document management system will do the rest for you.
Tip
By the way, there is a special article on the topic "The 10 most important advantages of digitizing paper documents".
Reduce human error with higher accuracy
Performing repetitive tasks such as manual data entry can be quite tedious and degrade the quality of your data as employees become fatigued or distracted and all the numbers and words are forgotten or mixed up.
In addition, the "access and user rights" factor also represents a limited group, because not all employees in your company have the right to view your company data and information.
For a software that includes automated text recognition, it's never difficult to stay focused and it can recognize the texts, see sensitive data, extract them and organize the outputs with high accuracy without "spilling" the company secrets.
Especially in these difficult times, it is very important for all companies to strengthen the competitiveness of the company by making it paperless or digital and ensuring that employees can also work flexibly from home. Ultimately, the company has to keep up with the digital age and realize the path to the paperless office.
Reduce costs and maximize office space
Manual data entry can be very labor intensive and the more receipts you have to process, the higher your personnel costs. In addition, there may be some additional costs related to data inaccuracies due to human error.
Through automated processing and reading of the data with artificial intelligence (AI), a document management system such as PaperOffice AI can help you to reduce these costs and at the same time free up office space, since you do not have to hire additional staff to manually digitize receipts or to store stacks of receipts in your office.
Maintain data integrity and improve data security.
Although both digital files and physical paper documents can be lost or damaged due to physical, environmental, or technological hazards, most organizations still waste time storing everything in physical archives and using local or cloud storage for digital records.
Tip
What the GDPR means for your document management is covered in our article GDPR and Document Management.
With PaperOffice AI, you work directly in the browser, on desktop or mobile. Your documents are processed in PaperOffice's own data center in Navarra (Spain, EU), on its own hardware. You do not need to set up a server of your own.
Or keep your receipts on your own Synology or QNAP NAS: with Bring Your Own Storage (BYOS), the files stay encrypted on your NAS, connected via SFTP, while PaperOffice keeps the index, metadata and AI results in its own EU data center. Learn more here.
Revision security must be guaranteed
In addition, data security and access management become easier as soon as the receipts have been digitized with PaperOffice AI: the data is stored encrypted with AES-256, transmitted via TLS 1.3 and archived in an audit-proof manner. You decide who may see which documents through permissions per workspace.
PaperOffice AI saves every changed copy of a document as a new version and keeps the earlier one, so that you can always open the desired version again.
How versioning and audit-proof document archiving work together is described in our article Versioning: Correctly carry out audit-proof document archiving.
Tip
How PaperOffice AI combines versions, checksums, retention periods and the audit log for audit-proof archiving is shown on our audit-proof archiving page.
What are the challenges when digitizing documents with OCR?
When extracting data with an OCR text recognition, there are some challenges that need to be considered. Invoice layouts vary greatly as each company has its own format.
So that your receipts can be read accurately, PaperOffice AI recognizes documents automatically with AI: AI OCR understands layout, tables and handwriting, and classification identifies the document type.
The AI reads the context of the page, not just individual characters.
Every recognized line and every extracted field comes with a confidence score and its position on the page, so you can trace every result. Missing required fields or failed extractions automatically go to a person for review (human-in-the-loop).
Reading relevant document information
Relevant document content such as dates, amounts, document types, keywords and document data are intelligently recognized, extracted and used for indexing. In addition, document information relevant to the document, such as the net total, gross total, VAT rate and document currency is searched for and then extracted. This intelligent recognition of the data runs automatically in PaperOffice AI, without template training.
Unfortunately, during the scanning process of paper documents, there are many factors that can affect the image quality, such as alignment, folds, font sizes, brightness, handwritten texts and more. This impairs the quality of the text recognition and the read data. This can mean that documents or document contents are not recognized correctly.
This is where regular expressions come into play.
Regular expressions (regex) are a fantastic way to search for exact values in text.
We explain in detail how you can use regular expressions using explicit examples in the second part of the article.
Getting started is easier than you think.
Are you still worried about not making it? Read the case studies from our customers and see for yourself how simple it is – or try PaperOffice AI with a free account right in your browser: Try live.
Who is a paperless office suitable for?
The quick and easy answer to the question is: for every company. All business sectors and sizes benefit from a paperless office, from SMEs and start-ups to large companies. However, the conversion is particularly valuable for small and medium-sized companies: The reduction in processing effort and costs frees up the budget required for further growth boosters.
Can I use a cloud-based DMS provider for my paperless office?
Yes – if the provider processes your documents in the EU and signs a data processing agreement (DPA) with you under Art. 28 GDPR. Data protection has been on everyone’s lips at least since the GDPR took effect in 2018: DMS solutions process, manage and store documents that often contain sensitive personal data, and violations of the GDPR can result in heavy fines. PaperOffice AI processes your documents in its own data center in Navarra (Spain, EU); your files can stay on your own storage (Bring Your Own Storage). If you want to work entirely locally, use PaperOffice Classic.
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Benefits justify the effort and costs
Working digitally and bringing old documents into the new age will be the best key investment to save an incredible amount of time, money and nerves in the future. -
You need someone who knows
You don't need your own IT specialist to take advantage of all the advantages of digitization.
What you need is the right partner at your side who, thanks to his experience, can implement exactly what you need. Avoid scaremongering and choose test positions instead of fancy PowerPoint presentations without having really tested it. -
The hardware is usually already available
Experience has shown that almost every operation, company and company has a large copier that does not use its potential. These devices love mass scans, are tolerant of paperclips and can be the basis for a digital start without a scanner investment. -
Cheaper than expected with the right DMS
Avoid cost traps with DMS / ECM systems where you are mercilessly at the mercy of the manufacturers. Do not make any compromises when it comes to your own administration options, such as setting up document types and making settings yourself. If you need help, the manufacturer will be happy to help you, but remain independent. -
Digital automation is the future
Procedures will be completely identical in the future, but fully automated.
Invoice coming in? The workflow is triggered and everything goes its defined way.
Search through all 1000 folders? No problem, because you have your own Google!
