What Is OCR?

OCR, or Optical Character Recognition, is a piece of technology that allows you to convert different types of documents into editable and searchable data. These documents include:

• Electronic PDFs
• Scanned paper documents
• Images captured from digital cameras
• Banners
• Posters
• Time tables

Energy management professionals and solution providers often resort to OCR as a means of efficiently collecting data from utility bills. They’ll scan and upload paper bills or take electronic PDFs and use OCR to scrape meaningful data points from the file.

OCR works well enough in a pinch when you have no other way of quickly aggregating data. But it can result in costly errors when the technology misreads certain values or dollar amounts. Ultimately, it fails to solve the problem of manual data entry, as it requires a data analyst to comb through the original bill and manually confirm whether the OCR categorized data points correctly. Without this extraneous process, data collected from OCR can’t be relied upon.

That’s why Urjanet’s Utility Data Platform was built to vanquish the errors of OCR by digitally retrieving the original bill directly from the utility provider. The automated data feed then undergoes multiple stages of data quality audits to ensure accuracy.

Looking for a better way to manage your utility data? Talk to an Urjanet specialist today.

You might also enjoy:

• The Pitfalls of Using OCR for Utility Bill Processing
• Solutions Sheet: Utility Data for Energy Management & Procurement
• 5 Uses of Energy Management Software

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