Image enabling gnucash?

[Bakki Kudva]

teri wrote:

In its current state OCR seems to work only in very controlled 
situations. eg. a warranty return card which you have control over and 
you force the user to write into boxes, or neatly typed paper documents 
which law firms use to do full text OCR and indexing etc. However free 
form OCR from various qualities of underlying images is error prone and 
the fix non-trivial. Even in production environments OCR finds use only 
in some apps. I am afraid that the average home user has such a wide 
variety of receipts and paperwork that you'd have to manually check OCR 
results anyhow. You wouldn't want $80.00 entered as $8000 from a poor 
original. Also some times the receipts don't have ALL the information. 
You'd have to deduce where you bought something based on your own memory 
since the cash register receipt may not have a merchant name or anything 
on it.

my $0.02

bakki


> But why not go one step further?  In addition to saving the digitized image,
> how about also feeding it to an OCR process/routine that would try to
> deduce the relevant account and numbers and preset the input fields so that
> with no/minimum modification/correction the transaction can be entered
> much more quickly?

> This assistant funcionality can be made as smart as desired.  It could even
> learn from previous transactions.  After all most people spend money at the
> same places over and over, and conveniently in the receipts is all the
> information: date/time, place of business, total amount, tax amount, etc...
> For other things, such as food items going  into the food sub-account and
> cleaning products going into the household maintenance account, after the
> first manual input specifying that item x goes here and item y goes there,
> this "assistant" would automatically remember this and add up the numbers
> automatically, so the user would just have to confirm the final breakdown
> of the transaction/receipt before it is committed. End of input drudgery.
> 
> Opinions anyone?
-- 
  .-.    | Bakki Kudva__________________Open Source EDMS______
  oo|    | Navaco                       ph:  814-833-2592
  /`'\    | 420 Pasadena Drive           fax: 603-947-5747
(\_;/)   | Erie, PA 16505               http://www.navaco.com/