Scanning bank statements into Excel

The_Pretender

I work in accounting, and a significant amount of time is spent doing basic inputting tasks such as transcribing data from hard copy bank statements into excel.

Does anyone know of a good software package that would streamline this process, allowing us to scan bank statements and have the data sent to excel? As it's an accounting practice, it's not practical to request soft copies of bank statements from all clients unfortunately.

Also, while not too necessary, if there was something similar that could be used to scan letters and such into Word, this would also make life easier.

Thanks for any suggestions!

mordeith

I don't think it would be worth it in the long run. No OCR program is 100% accurate and with bank statements you would need to compare the original with the scan every time to make sure there were no errors.

bpmurray

You could try ABBY - I have the freebie version that came with my scanner and it's pretty good. I believe the professional version is very good and it can create Excel, Word, PDF, and loads more.

The_Pretender

mordeith wrote: »

I don't think it would be worth it in the long run. No OCR program is 100% accurate and with bank statements you would need to compare the original with the scan every time to make sure there were no errors.

Yeah I know what you mean. We usually have a formula running along the balance column to check the running total, so we can see if our balance isn't the same as the one of the bank statements then we know there's been an error in inputting.

I would hope that even if something has been picked up wrong, that it would just be a matter of swapping the balance column on the scanned in bank statement with our own formulated balance column, that way we could run through the bank statements compare balances at X date, to narrow down where the mistake is and fix it. I thought this would be quicker than having to input everything, and still having to check for human errors in inputting.

bpmurray wrote: »

You could try ABBY - I have the freebie version that came with my scanner and it's pretty good. I believe the professional version is very good and it can create Excel, Word, PDF, and loads more.

Thanks for that, I'll definitely check it out. If the free version works well then I may be able to convince them to get a professional license for it.

golfcaptain

If they have online banking you could consider requesting direct access to that. They'd setup you as a user with permissions to view data only, without being able to create payments etc. Then you can login and export statements etc.

ED E

The ix500 is designed for office use to go paperless.

http://www.fujitsu.com/us/products/computing/peripheral/scanners/scansnap/ix500/

I'm not sure if its able to OCR out directly to excel but you could go Paper-PDF-Copy Paste to Excel.

srsly78

Downloading the statements in excel format is a much better idea. If your bank doesn't offer this service then use a better one!

tommyhayes1989

We use AutoRec. Its excellent. Not sure how much. OCREx i think is the company