Optical character recognition

Optical character recognition reads text from images and scanned documents and turns it into editable, searchable text.

In practice: Point it at a photo of a receipt, a scanned contract or a screenshot, and it extracts the words. AI-based OCR also understands layout, such as tables, forms and handwriting, and can pull out specific fields like totals and dates.

Why it matters when picking a tool

For receipts, invoices and forms, what matters is field extraction accuracy on your documents and whether results go straight into your accounting or spreadsheet tool. Test with poor-quality scans and handwriting, where tools differ most.