F4F’s OCR is tightly linked into our OCR Gateway to provide a full Electronic Document Capture service. Together, these two components of the B2B Platform enable us to deliver to your back-office system everything you need to be able to process data from paper or image sources.

The most common document types we process by this means are Purchase Orders and Invoices, and the most common sources are:

• Faxes sent either manually or via software such as Zetafax (of course, they must not be handwritten, as our OCR Engine is not a handwriting recognition tool)
• PDF files 
• Paper documents, scanned either by your company or by F4F on your behalf, and sent to the OCR Engine by e-mail or via FTP, for example.

On receipt of the image, we check its source and apply a set of pre-prepared rules, which have been developed with your help to locate and extract the key data items from the document.

We can then turn the data extracted from the source image into the exact file format that you receive from others, and which you can import into your back-office system.
In addition, we can send you the original image as well, in a file named according to the sender and the document number, so that your staff can store it locally and access it subsequently should the need arise.

And if there is a problem in interpreting any of the data items on the source image, we apply rules to send you an e-mail alert, inviting you to visit a website where you will be able to see both the image itself and the data extracted from it. Any areas of doubt are highlighted, so that you can work quickly with the sender to resolve any ambiguity and have the document forwarded on to your IT system as normal.