What OCR actually changes for a small practice

OCR gets marketed as alchemy: photograph anything, receive perfect books. Reality is more useful and less magical. What document intelligence genuinely eliminates is transcription — the slowest, error-prone step between a paper receipt and a usable record.

The economics matter most for small practices. A two-person firm processing forty client receipts a week spends hours on pure keying. At even three minutes per document saved, that is two working days a month returned to actual accountancy.

Accuracy improves less dramatically than speed, but where it matters. Per-field confidence scores tell you which values to trust and which to check — review effort concentrates on the 10% that needs eyes instead of 100% by default.

The real transformation arrives downstream. Once receipts enter the system as structured data, VAT estimates, expense categories and year-end packs stop being projects; they are queries over records that already exist.