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Can OCR reliably extract data from invoices and scanned documents?
OCR works reasonably well on clean, printed documents with consistent layouts, but accuracy falls with poor scans, unusual layouts, stamps or handwriting. Treat OCR output as a draft, validate key fields like totals and dates, and route low-confidence results for human review.
Ways to improve reliability:
- Use good-quality scans or original PDFs where possible.
- Validate extracted amounts, for example that line items add up to the total.
- Cross-check supplier and invoice numbers against existing records to catch duplicates.
- Keep the original file linked to the extracted row.
Modern document-extraction services and AI tools can handle varied layouts, but they still make mistakes. Never send sensitive personal data to a tool without checking where it is processed and stored.
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