Receipt Scanning is now Essential for Your Expense Management Software

All innovative companies, no matter the size or industry, depend on expense management software to carry out monotonous book-keeping tasks. However, despite developments in ML and Natural Language Processing, a substantial number fail to provide the necessary features such as invoice data extraction and accurate receipt scanning.

This is a huge disadvantage for these expense management software or accounting companies, as their customers are directly disadvantaged.

Businesses are constantly on the lookout for ways to increase speed, accuracy and automation. As receipt scanners provide this, with added benefits such as minimizing the risk of losing receipts, it is among the top features a customer searches for when selecting an expense management software solution

It is clear that excluding an automatic receipt data extraction feature is damaging to the success of this software company.

Does this resonate with you? Does your software also lack the ability to scan receipts and invoices correctly and reliably? If the answer is “yes,” then you’re in the right place. Fortunately, you can swiftly fix this issue by integrating a receipt OCR API within your software.

In this guide, you’ll also uncover six reasons why your expense management software must have a receipt scanning feature.

But first the basics…How does a receipt OCR API actually work?

The receipt OCR API lets your users upload an image of their receipt or invoice in your software.

Next, it scans through the image to identify data fields, such as the vendor name, price, and place where the receipt or invoice was issued.

Subsequently, the data extracted is transformed into a format that your expense management software will understand.

Reasons to integrate a receipt OCR API in your expense management software.

1. More Accurate receipt and invoice data extraction.

Unlike standard OCRs used to capture data from contracts, reports, and other files, a receipt OCR API is designed to extract information from low-quality prints, with high accuracy.

Receipt OCR APIs can also recognise specific data fields on invoices and receipts, irrespective of its format.

This is vital, as suppliers and vendors have different layouts for their receipts and invoices. Even when two stores are in the same city, their receipts can have completely diverse formats.

Furthermore, you can increase the accuracy of your receipt and invoice data extraction through adding a parameter in your receipt OCR’s to identify where the invoice or receipt were created.

Something worth knowing is that most receipt scanning and invoice data extraction APIs are polyglots.  The consequence of this is that they can instantly comprehend and translate what’s written on the receipt or invoice, even if it’s in a distinctive language or dialect.

2. Streamline your customers’ Accounting Processes.

One of the most time-consuming and tiresome tasks that employees encounter is filling in expense forms and submitting them to your accounting department.

Integrating a receipt OCR API within your expense management software naturally accelerates this process for your customers.

Your customers can now take a picture of the receipt or invoice and then upload this to your expense management software immediately.

This removes the hassle of saving all of the physical receipts and invoices they need. 

The receipt OCR API then obtains the crucial details needed to create an entry in an expense form. You can also customize your receipt OCR code to allow it to group the data collected into expense categories, further streamlining the process for your users.

3. Improve your clients’ Resource-use Efficiency and Business Decisions

Unfortunately, as human beings, human error is inevitable.

Even the smallest mistakes, such as uploading duplicate receipts and invoices, can cost businesses significant time and money to amend (conditional on the situation, of course).

With receipt OCR, you can easily solve this issue by customizing the code to incorporate parameters to flag and notify your clients of duplicate entries and invoices with dodgy data.

Your client’s accountant can then quickly acquire the flagged entries and review them before they’re finalized. This saves your client precious resources in time and money, thus improving their user experience with your software.

As expense tracking is one of the most crucial operations in any business, expense reports generated by your expense management software is critical in their decision-making activities These activities are also what certifies companies file the correct taxes and avoid getting penalized.

All these are dependent on one key ingredient: The accuracy of the data they entered in your expense management software.

If your expense management software isn’t equipped with a receipt OCR API, that’ll mean your clients must carry out data entry manually.

The issue with inaccurate or incomplete data in this case is the chain reaction that’ll ultimately result in your clients making poor business decisions.

4. Provide Financial Data Privacy and Security.

Receipt OCR APIs don’t only decrease complications for your clients to update their expense reports. Another benefit exists in the realm of financial data security.

Supplementary parameters can be included within the receipt OCR API code to reinforce security measures when retrieving financial data. For example, generating a password protocol.

Including these security structures will guarantee that only authorized personnel can access their financial data. This is imperative for your clients.

5. The Power in Multiple Programming Languages.

Receipt OCR API developers are aware that companies develop expense management software and apps in an assortment of programming languages.

Companies like Taggun, for example, provide software developers like you their receipt OCR API code written in Node.js, C#, .NET, PHP, and Python.

You can therefore integrate the code into your expense management software, enabling you to rapidly launch this feature to your clients.

6. The Competitive Edge

Even some of the most popular accounting and expense management software available today don’t provide a receipt scanning and invoice data extraction feature.

In this question posed in Quora, we can also see that that those do struggle with the accuracy of the data they extract.

Because of this, users must search for a third-party tool such as Zintego Receipt Maker to integrate into their current expense management software.

The Solution

A Receipt OCR API in your expense management software equips you with the means to meet what your clients wants and needs.

This provides you with a compelling and unique selling point to share with your potential clients and customers.

Additionally, clients will be convinced to switch to your software when you’re able to provide something novel, something that their current platform doesn’t.

The receipt OCR API is the game-changer to your expense management software. 

It provides your clients with the necessary functions to stimulate and accelerate growth.

You can start providing that to your customers today by choosing a receipt OCR API provider, embed the code in your expense management software program, customize it, and launch!