Hi,
What I've got seems like a pretty run-of-the mill application for scanning software but I haven't seen anything. Perhaps someone else has?
I need to scan in documents (call them sales receipts) and convert them to PDF for archiving. Problem is I want to scan hundreds at a time, and want to save each as it's own individual PDF, not one giant 100 page PDF.
I don't want to have a human sit there and scan each one individually and assign each a filename. I want the software to scan each page, use OCR technology to find the ticket number on the page (it's always in the same location, in the same font...), then output a PDF of that page with a filename something like [TICKET NUMBER]&[DATE/TIME].PDF
For example, ticket 01234 is scanned in on 5/9/08 at 11:20pm, filename should be 01234200805092320.pdf
And of course it needs to do this automatically for a stack of tickets that are fed through the scanner.
Conceptually, I'd think if there were OCR software that one could define an area of the page to look at, then OCR what's in that area, transfer it to a variable, and use that variable in the file naming process we'd be done. Sounds simple, eh?
Just can't imagine there aren't a bunch of options out there - I can't imagine this would not be useful for every retailer in business who did not want to either keep paper copies of signed invoices OR have humans involved in the scanning, but maybe it's not that normal to do?
Thanks
Todd
Since you are going to scan in documents, you also must have some sort of quality assurance process. Scanners double sheet feed, crumple pages, etc. I say the whole technology is built upon the quality of little rubber rollers. We store health information documents which must be searchable for 20 years. You need to be aware of the whole document life cycle, document prep (what, none are stapled or folded?), scanning, Q/A. storage (note, each scanned page can get pretty big if color is involved), reporting, searching, long term storage (we use DVDs to keep off site images, and have had problems with them after 5-7 years). There are lots of other apps, but I doubt if any really good ones are off-the-shelf. Good luck.