OCR, or optical character recognition, is a technology that analyzes printed text, and converts that information into editable / searchable text. This technology is especially useful when scanning invoices for accounts payable purposes because in most cases, several fields need to be extracted from each invoice to ensure that information is useful for business purposes.
By automating this process with OCR, much of the manual data entry typically required to process an invoice is mitigated. This generally adds up to huge cost savings over time by reducing the overhead associated with manual labor.