AI & Automation
What is OCR (Optical Character Recognition)?
OCR (Optical Character Recognition) is technology that reads text from scanned documents, PDFs, and images and converts it into structured, machine-readable data.
Explanation
Traditional OCR was rules-based — it looked for specific character shapes and worked well on clean, standardized documents but broke down on handwriting, rotated pages, or unusual fonts. Modern AI-powered OCR combines computer vision and machine learning to handle virtually any document format with far greater accuracy. In accounting, OCR is the foundation of any document automation workflow. Before a system can extract invoice totals, match line items, or post to an ERP, it first needs to read the document. OCR quality is therefore the single biggest driver of downstream accuracy. Poor OCR leads to errors that compound through every step of the process. Enterprise-grade accounting automation platforms use AI OCR that can handle multi-column layouts, mixed languages, handwritten annotations, and documents that are partially obscured or low-resolution.
How Rima relates
Rima uses AI-powered OCR as part of its document extraction engine, achieving 99%+ accuracy across invoices, bank statements, receipts, and financial reports — regardless of format or layout.
See how Rima extracts documentsRelated Terms
AI Document Processing
Using artificial intelligence to automatically extract, classify, and process data from documents.
Structured Data Extraction
The process of pulling specific, organized fields from unstructured documents like PDFs or emails.
Data Extraction
The process of retrieving specific data from source documents or systems for further processing.
See it in action
Rima automates the manual document workflows accounting teams spend hours on every week.