Results of a Study on Invoice-Reading Systems in Germany

Abstract

Abstract. Companies order, receive, and pay for goods. Hence they continually receive and process invoices. For the most part these are printed on paper and are dealt with manually, so that each invoice after receipt involves processing costs of about 9 Euro on average. Often, human searching and typing of data into computer forms is required to transfer the information from paper into the computer, e.g. into ERP-systems, like SAP, that many companies run. This article presents the main results of our 300-page market survey of 11 suppliers of invoice reading systems (,56), which automate the transfer of invoice data to ERP-systems. For the scientific ,56 community we hope to provide the service of a better visibility of our discipline to potential investors and users.

Information extraction by finding repeated structure

“…The performance with such generalized annotations was comparable to performance with annotations specifically made for each invoice. This approach saves significant annotation effort, since many companies receive most of their invoices from a small subset of vendors [8]. Reducing the need for human annotation further is the subject of future work.…”

“…However, despite its recognized value in business workflows, such data extraction tasks suffer from inadequate or unreliable levels of automation and are still largely done manually. The cost of manual data extraction can be quite high; for example, manually processing a single invoice can cost up to 9 Euro [8]. Large businesses may process tens of thousands of invoices per day, leading to high cost of operations.…”

A Document Analysis System for Supporting Electronic Voting Research

“…There is, of course, a connection between ballot reading and automatic forms processing, a topic which has been heavily studied in our field (e.g., [11,12,13]), as well as to the scoring of standardized tests, as noted earlier. Processing paper ballots used in elections differs from these other tasks in important ways, however.…”

Form similarity via Levenshtein distance between ortho-filtered logarithmic ruling-gap ratios

“…Form reading achieved commercial viability after a decade of experimentation 6,7,8,9 . Specialized algorithms were crafted to detect parallel rulings in large forms or drawings 10,11 .…”