After the post a while ago about scanning documents into excel etc I was wondering what software people use? The most popular online is the ABBYY Finereader one, but I cant stretch that far at the minute. Has anyone used Readiris Pro? Its £40 on Amazon. The ABBYY is £99 or there is a download licence for £65.
Only software that I have found that properly recognises fields in scanned PDFs and extracts them properly to Excel.
The other day I was sent an 800 page PDF bank statement and the software converted it straight to Excel format with correct spacing very quickly without issue.
I've tried other software (many, many other bits of software! There was no way that I was typing in 800 pages!!!) and the common fault is that they often do not recognise spaces / white space so when converting to Excel, fields end up in the wrong columns or you end up with several fields in one cell.
This software however worked perfectly without any manual post conversion fixing.
By all means try all the alternatives but when you try this one I think that you will be quite impressed.
If you do buy it (try it free first to make sure that it works for you), make sure that you scroll down to the special offers rather than paying full price at the top of their page.
Its not expensive, about $30 for PDFelement and an extra $20 for the OCR add in the make scanned documents editable (around £33 all in)
It also makes PDF's editable and can act as your default PDF reader instead of the the normal Abode reader.
Just a quick disclaimer that I cannot be held responsible for any damage caused by any software that I mention in my reply that people subsequently download to their own machines. I've had no issue with this software but you very much need to investigate it properly yourself and make your own decision as to whether or not it is right for you.
__________________
Shaun
Responses are not meant as a substitute for professional advice. Answers are intended as outline only the advice of a qualified professional with access to all relevant information should be sought before acting on any response given.
p.s. I know that my reply reads as though its answering how to edit PDFs (which to a certain extent it is) but generally one scans to PDF then looks at a picture of the page unable to edit it. So my answer gives a PDF editor with an add on OCR capability which I think is what you are rerally looking for.
ALWAYS try before you buy with this sort of software as price is no guarantee that it will do what you want it to. I tried some quite expensive offerings and hit white space issues. If they don't offer a limited fiunctionality or time restrained trial period, move on or you could end up spending a fortune on a turkey (I must have tried at least twenty options before finding one that actually worked... And it also happened to be one of the cheapest!!!!!).
__________________
Shaun
Responses are not meant as a substitute for professional advice. Answers are intended as outline only the advice of a qualified professional with access to all relevant information should be sought before acting on any response given.
Many thanks for the information regarding Wondershare. It looks very impressive and certainly not expensive for what it appears to do.
I have downloaded the trail version, and was going to test a variety of different bank statements to see how well it performs as I think it would be extremely useful for number of our clients. However, it does not seen to offer a trail of the OCR plug in or have i missed something?
good point and one that I had missed. The PDF that drove me to the search was straight from the client rather than scanned and it was working with that trial after trial after trial of other software that impressed me so much with it when I tried it so I purchased it without noticing that the OCR add on software isn't in the trial version.
You should still be able to trial the software against delivered PDFs from clients where such has been output by their software but I don't think that you will be able to trial it against a document that you need to scan yourself first.
just tried a few scans of different statements (Lloyds, NatWest, Santander and Barclays). I scanned as Jpegs, then printed to Wondersare PDF's (it adds that as a printer option when you install the software... Works very much in a similar manner to CutePDF (another bit of great software)), then in the document in wondershare do the convert to Excel.
Everything for all documents that I have tested is perfect including formatting.
One small thing is that fields seperated by something other than a space are not recognised as seperate fields. i.e. the BIC and IBAN are seperated with a colon so it puts them in a single field BUT formatting of the fields is retained so if the valkue is highlighted its highlighted in the field. Also scaling is maintained.
Anything that is not a recognisable character such as the picture of the black horse on a Lloyds statement is lost on conversion to Excel but the pics are there in the editable PDF within Wondershare.
I think that I'm now even more impressed with it after that quick trial.
Hope that the above helps and hope that you have a few PDF's lying arond to try it with.
kindest rgeards,
Shaun.
__________________
Shaun
Responses are not meant as a substitute for professional advice. Answers are intended as outline only the advice of a qualified professional with access to all relevant information should be sought before acting on any response given.
Shaun, not sure if prices have gone up since, but the PDF Elements is not $70 and OCR add on is $20, so makes about £65 in total.
In the trial it wont allow me to do the OCR bit, and without my scanned pdf just comes up blank in Excel. Going to have a look again tomorrow, beer, x files and knitting calls :)
no, scroll down to the bottom of the page. Not what looks like the bottom of the page, just keep scrolling down till you get to the special offer bundle :
See, much cheaper than at the top of the page (I didn't buy the password remover part of it).
The above is definitely on this page : https://store.wondershare.com/shop/buy/buy-pdf-editor.html
Responses are not meant as a substitute for professional advice. Answers are intended as outline only the advice of a qualified professional with access to all relevant information should be sought before acting on any response given.
I had a look at this fairly late last night and tried it on a clients PDF statements as suggested. However it would not convert to Excel as the PDF was password protected and a little late to phone the client for the password.
Had another go this morning with our business bank statements.
I have tried a few of these type of programs in the past and have never been impressed. However, I have to say this one exceeded my expectations and will be purchasing it today. Probably will not use it for just a few statements, but more so for the sole trader who tuns up with a years Business and Private bank statements.
I bought it too today, was £33, Shaun you should claim some form of recommendaton fee :)
Had a bit of play this morning, got paniced as the first pdf I did turned into gobbledegook them I realised it was in landscape! Turned it round and was fine :)
Now need to see how implement into my normal work. I'm sure I can do something with macros
seems as though we hit the same problems with this sort of software making promises in the sales blurb that the software itself simply couldn't match.
Last thing that I expected was to find the best that I've encountered as one of the cheapest ot there!
__________________
Shaun
Responses are not meant as a substitute for professional advice. Answers are intended as outline only the advice of a qualified professional with access to all relevant information should be sought before acting on any response given.
This is a great example of people asking a question on here and having a real positive impact for the readership.
Without your question I wouldn't have thought to tell anyone about it so nice one Lyndsey. I think that you've made Jays Christmas card list. lol.
Have fun with your macro's.
Shaun.
__________________
Shaun
Responses are not meant as a substitute for professional advice. Answers are intended as outline only the advice of a qualified professional with access to all relevant information should be sought before acting on any response given.
I've been wondering if there is anything that does this sort of thing for a little while. I'm not worried about OCR - because the use case I've been thinking about wouldn't need that:
A particular client gives me the payroll summary as a print out; each row is an employee, with columns for gross, PAYE, NICs, etc. I then do some manual calcs (e.g. breaking down the totals for different classes of employee), and write and post a journal as necessary. I was thinking that if I was presented with the summary in digital form, I could write a little program to parse it out and generate the journal for me, ready for importing - and since a combination of the program parsing it and the accounts software importing it would be *so* much faster than me doing it manually, it could be done with a lot more detail. (So instead of just the total for the drivers wages going into the right account, for example, the *individual* drivers wages could be posted). This software, therefore, could be a good starting point.
However, I haven't suggested this to that client yet. (I was going to wait until a natural break-point: the end of this tax year/the start of the next).
So I decided to try it on another client's payroll summary - although in this case, I wouldn't be able to do the above: The software (a cloud "solution") has no import option. It would serve as a good test of PDF Elements though.
No CSV export? Okay, not a problem: I can export as Excel, and just load that into OpenOffice Calc.
"OpenOffice requires a Java runtime environment (JRE) to perform this task. Please install a JRE and restart OpenOffice."
WTF?
Just to clarify the "WTF?" - I know exactly what a JRE is, and I know I don't have one installed: It's a deliberate choice on my part. I have no JRE for the same reason I have no Adobe Flash. The "WTF?" is more along the lines of "WTF is it putting into what should be a very *simple* Excel file that needs a JRE before OpenOffice can load it?"
I think I'll just get the client in question to send me a CSV. I'm sure he can be trained as necessary.
Edit: On second thoughts, perhaps my initial test isn't ideal and I'm doing it an injustice. The layout of the payroll summary isn't the same as the other client's, and that may make a difference.
The other client's is a straightforward table layout as described above. The one I used to try it is somewhat more (shall we say...) "imaginatively" laid out; Several different small tables, with unnecessary borders around them. (I wonder if its those borders that's causing the problem: if it's trying to recreate them in the Excel format in some way that's leading to the problem?)
I think I need to get a PDF version of the *real* payroll summary I want to use and try it on that before condemning it to the bit bucket.
-- Edited by VinceH on Wednesday 17th of February 2016 08:20:32 PM
__________________
Vince M Hudd - Soft Rock Software
(I only came here looking for fellow apiarists...)
