In today’s fast-paced, digital-first business environment, the ability to accurately extract data from a wide variety of documents—regardless of their quality, language, or format—is a game-changer for accounts payable (AP) teams. Tungsten AP Essentials offers two powerful OCR (Optical Character Recognition) engines: the Classic OCR Engine and the new Advanced OCR Engine. This blog post will help you understand the technical differences, the compelling reasons to switch to the Advanced Engine now, and provide an extremely easy, step-by-step guide to enabling it in your environment.
Why Advanced OCR? The Case for Upgrading
1. Superior Performance on Poor Quality Scans
The most compelling reason to choose the Advanced OCR Engine today is its remarkable ability to handle scanned images with poor image quality. Traditional OCR systems often struggle with blurry, skewed, low-resolution, or noisy documents. In contrast, our Advanced OCR Engine leverages state-of-the-art AI and deep learning models to preprocess, enhance, and accurately extract text—even from challenging scans.
Real-World Example:
Imagine processing a batch of invoices where some are faded, others are photographed at odd angles, and a few contain handwritten notes. The Advanced OCR Engine’s AI-driven preprocessing (binarization, noise reduction, skew correction) and robust recognition models ensure high accuracy, reducing the need for manual intervention and costly errors.
2. Expanded Language and Handwriting Support
- Language Coverage: The Advanced OCR Engine supports over 300 languages, more than doubling the coverage of the Classic OCR Engine. This is crucial for global businesses dealing with multilingual documents.
- Handwriting Recognition: Thanks to AI-based improvements, the Advanced OCR Engine excels at recognizing handwriting, making it ideal for forms, notes, and documents with mixed content.
3. AI-Driven Accuracy and Efficiency
Modern AI-powered OCR solutions routinely achieve 95–99% accuracy on invoice processing, even with poor-quality scans. This translates to:
- Faster processing times (from days to minutes)
- Significant cost reductions (up to 80%)
- Dramatic error reduction (from 10% to 1–2% or less)
4. Future-Proofing Your AP Operations
The Advanced OCR Engine is not just a better choice today—it’s the future of Tungsten InvoiceAgility and AP Essentials.
How to Enable Advanced OCR in Tungsten AP Essentials: Step-by-Step
Enabling the Advanced OCR Engine is designed to be extremely simple for administrators. Here’s how you do it:
Step 1: Log in to Admin Center
- Use your administrator credentials to access Tungsten AP Essentials Admin Center.
Step 2: Navigate to Extraction Service Settings
- Locate and select the Extraction service settings and click Edit.
Step 3: Select the Advanced Engine
- In the Extraction engine settings (General tab), you’ll see both the Classic Engine and Advanced Engine listed.
- Choose Advanced Engine from the dropdown or selection menu.
Step 4: Save and Apply Changes
- Click Save to confirm your selection.
- The system will now use the Advanced OCR Engine for all subsequent document extractions.
That’s it! No complex configuration, no downtime, just a simple switch that unlocks the power of AI-driven OCR for your AP processes.
Technical Deep Dive: Why AI-Driven OCR Matters
How AI Handles Poor Quality Scans
AI-powered OCR engines use a combination of advanced preprocessing and deep learning:
- Preprocessing: Binarization, noise reduction, skew correction, and contrast enhancement make even faded or distorted text readable.
- Deep Learning Models: Trained on millions of real-world documents, these models recognize text in diverse fonts, layouts, and languages, and can even interpret handwriting.
- Continuous Learning: The system improves over time, learning from user corrections and new document types.
Impact on Invoice Processing
- Speed: Invoices that could not be extracted previously and require manual rescan or image improvements now only take minutes to process.
- Accuracy: Error rates drop dramatically, reducing payment disputes and manual rework.
- Scalability: Process hundreds of thousands of invoices annually, even from diverse suppliers and in multiple languages
Tungsten AP Essentials: Extraction Services at a Glance
Tungsten AP Essentials uses patented, core technologies to automatically interpret and extract data from your documents, reducing manual work and human error. With country-specific logic and support for a wide variety of document types and languages, AP Essentials ensures that your data extraction is both accurate and compliant. After extraction, output services can seamlessly send documents and interpreted data to your target systems, streamlining your entire AP workflow.
Die nächsten Schritte
The Advanced OCR Engine in Tungsten AP Essentials represents a significant leap forward in document processing—delivering superior accuracy, broader language and handwriting support, and robust performance on poor-quality scans.
Ready to upgrade?
Log in to your Admin Center and enable the Advanced OCR Engine today to experience the next generation of intelligent document extraction.
Want to learn more?
Contact our team or explore our knowledge base for additional resources, best practices, and case studies on how AI-driven OCR is transforming AP operations worldwide.
Empower your AP team with the best in AI-driven document extraction—switch to the Advanced OCR Engine in Tungsten AP Essentials today!