Artificial intelligence in Accounting & OCRex Bank Reconciliation Software

Martin's Accounting Blog writes: In the latter part of 2013, I noticed several new developments in cloud accounting software. I suppose one of the key advantages of cloud accounting software is that it allows the software provider to concentrate on what they do well, while at the same time allow other software providers to integrate with their products. And, some of these products include some level of artificial intelligence.

To give an example of a non-cloud product first, Irish firm OCRex use optical character recognition to help accounting practices do bank reconciliations when smaller clients don’t do this – see http://www.ocrex.com/home. This software reads scanned bank statements and reconciles opening and closing closing balances, and leaving the accountant with the job of checking for missing items only. Thus, this product is intelligent in that it matches items on the bank statement using amounts and other information like to a reference.

Now let’s take this idea to the cloud. Several accounting software products can now scan emails., faxes and scanned documents to determine not only the amount of a business transaction, but also determine what kind of transaction it is. For example, xero software offers an add-on which reads transactions and posts automatically to the correct expense account. From my understanding of the xero add-on, it also learns as it goes, learning what supplier is posted to which expenses account etc. This certainly has a lot of potential for small businesses, reducing processing time and storing documents in the cloud.

OCRex Bank Reconciliation Software 

While billions are spent annually on manual data entry tasks across the accounting industry globally, we develop accounting practice solutions that automate these tasks and eliminate this spend. OCRex delivers tailor made reconciliation solutions for highly accurate data extraction from scanned images of paper bank documents for ShoeBox / Paper based clients. Our reconciliation accounting solutions remove data entry dependencies providing significant efficiencies in terms of time, costs and accuracy.

With licenses for every level of user in mind, AutoRec™ can save your firm thousands per user, every year. AutoRec lets you to take on more business without additional staff while providing quicker turn-around on accounts preparation and analysis. Why not contact us for a live demo, we promise you won't be disappointed!

Using AutoRec you can scan your client’s bank statements on your standard office scanner straight into a bank reconciliation spreadsheet. Our bank reconciliationaccounting software will verify the accuracy of the scanned data. AutoRec will read each page image automatically detecting what bank statement type it is. We can also recognise each cheque number presented on the bank statement additionally identifying and presenting missing cheque numbers.