Hi everyone! I'm in a bit of a bind with processing paper forms that we receive from our customers. Unfortunately, I can't eliminate them, so I need to find a solid way to transcribe these forms into our system. Sometimes, these forms come as printouts of fillable PDFs, but other times they're handwritten, which can get tricky since the way people fill them out can vary. I want to know what tools or systems you all are using that could help with this. I've tried M365 Copilot with a scanned, searchable PDF, and while it did produce a CSV file with the right prompts, it's not very efficient for processing large numbers. I've also looked into Power Automate, but I'm not sure if I need anything like Azure AI Document Intelligence or some other AI Builder tools. I even experimented with Python and Tesseract, but the results were disappointing. Any recommendations or insights on tools that have worked for you would be greatly appreciated! Thanks!
2 Answers
For our clients, we use PaperStream, and it does a pretty decent job, especially for medical billing documents. It might be worth checking out!
If you need to stick with paper forms, consider tweaking the forms to optimize them for OCR. Modifying font types, sizes, or even the layout can make a real difference in accuracy! I recently went to a new DMV that barely had places for people to fill out forms, which shows a shift in thinking about these things.
That’s true! We’re kind of at the mercy of what our clients send us; sometimes they print and fill them out with Adobe, or even handwrite on blank forms.