In today’s fast-paced business environment, efficiency is key to success. That’s where Optical Character Recognition (OCR) and AP Automation come into play. By leveraging OCR technology in NetSuite, businesses can convert scanned or digital documents, such as invoices, into machine-readable formats, significantly streamlining the accounts payable process. In a recent blog post, we explored the difference between OCR technology and AI algorithms, both integral to automating the invoice scanning process in NetSuite, as well as analyzed the benefits. If you would like to learn more on this topic, we invite you to read the full blog post here.
While OCR plays a crucial role in extracting relevant information from invoices, receipts, purchase orders, and other financial documents, it is important to understand that OCR is not always perfect and may make errors in recognizing characters. The accuracy of OCR is influenced by various factors such as the quality of documents and images, specific parameters and account settings, document types, and the frequency of data representation, just to name a few. In this blog post, we are going to take a closer look into the realm of OCR accuracy, exploring how it’s measured, the role of field-level confidence scores, and most importantly, how SquareWorks’ OCR accuracy stands apart from other solutions.
How is OCR Accuracy Measured?
OCR systems have come a long way in improving accuracy, with some systems claiming a 99% accuracy rate across three levels: character-level, word-level, and page-level accuracy. This means that only one character in 1000 may be misread or skipped, resulting in a mere 0.1% error rate. While this high level of accuracy seems promising, it is crucial to examine what this means in the context of AP automation. For example, if only one character in 1000 is misread or skipped, the error could fall into the wrong place, decreasing the overall accuracy of the OCR. In turn, this damages the field-level confidence score, which is why understanding the difference between OCR accuracy and field-level confidence score is important.
What is a Field-Level Confidence Score?
Field-level confidence scores play a pivotal role in evaluating the dependability of OCR output for header-level fields within a document. The score is represented as either a percentage or a value between 0 and 100 indicating how often users need to change the value populated into header-level fields when bills are entered. A higher field-level confidence score means there is a greater likelihood that the extracted data is accurate, reducing the need for manual verification.
What is SquareWorks’ OCR Accuracy and Field-Level Confidence Score?
To ensure maximum accessibility and usefulness of OCR output, further analysis and often corrections are required. Relying solely on OCR solutions claiming a 99% accuracy rate may not always yield the best results for your business. Instead, it is essential to choose the right OCR solution that aligns with your specific needs and further analyze what the 99% claim means.
For SquareWorks AI-Enabled OCR and Invoice Scanning feature within SquareWorks AP Automation Suite, many customers attest to OCR accuracy ranges between 95-99%, showcasing the exceptional precision of our scans. When analyzing field-level confidence scores, or how frequently the proposed value is correct, we consistently achieve a remarkable accuracy rate of 90% and above. This steadfast track record showcases our commitment to accurate data extraction, instilling confidence in your processed information.
Conclusion
Opting for a purpose-built, NetSuite-native solution, such as SquareWorks AI-Enabled OCR and Invoice Scanning feature, can make a significant difference. With SquareWorks OCR technology, you can be confident that data, including vendor information, invoice numbers, and line items, will be accurately extracted and automatically visible in NetSuite. Over time, SquareWorks’ OCR technology will learn and adapt as your organization processes more invoices, gradually reducing the need for manual data entry and review. If you are interested in learning more about SquareWorks AI-Enabled OCR and Invoice Scanning feature and customer OCR accuracy rates, please reach out to us here.