Asking which is the best OCR software for accounts payable produces a comparison table, and the table will not help, because every product reads a clean PDF invoice from a regular supplier. The differences appear on the documents you would rather not show a salesperson: the photographed invoice, the multi-page one, the supplier whose layout changed last quarter. This page is a way of judging that does not rely on anybody's published accuracy figure. It is three tests you can run in a trial, in an afternoon, using your own documents, and it will tell you more than a month of feature comparison.
Test one: your worst twenty invoices
Not a representative sample, the worst twenty. Count what each tool reads correctly, what it flags, and what it gets wrong without flagging. That third number is the one that matters, because a confident wrong answer is the only failure mode that reaches the ledger.
Test two: the exception interface, timed
Have somebody who is not you correct ten flagged invoices and time it. If correcting is slower than typing, the tool is a step rather than a saving, whatever it reads. Time it with a stopwatch rather than impressions, because the difference between eight seconds and forty is the whole business case at four hundred invoices a month.
Test three: the write into your system
Post ten captured invoices end to end and break one deliberately, by using a supplier that does not exist. What happens next tells you whether you are buying one system or two. On the worked example on this site, 400 invoices at three touches of six minutes with a 12% exception rate is 134.4 hours a month, $4,300.80 at a $32 loaded rate and $10.75 an invoice.
Questions people ask about best ocr software for accounts payable
Are the expensive tools better at reading?
Marginally, and mostly on unusual layouts. The bigger differences are in the exception interface and the integration, which is where the price is actually going.
Should we use our accounting package's built-in capture?
Test it first, because it is already integrated and that is worth a great deal. It is often adequate at small volumes and rarely the best reader.
What about supplier portals instead?
They avoid reading altogether by having suppliers enter data, which works when you have leverage and volume. At thirty suppliers it usually creates a channel nobody watches.