The Benefits of OCR in Expert Tax
Are you a CPA with a long list of client information that you need to enter manually? Tired of the tedious and repetitive work of data entry? OCR is a tool we’ve implemented in Expert Tax to help you speed up the process of transferring information into our platform. Learn more about how OCR saves you valuable time when filing tax returns.
What is OCR?
Optical Character Recognition (OCR) is a technology that captures information from a document or image and prepares it to be edited, transferred, or converted into an electronic format.
For example, in Puerto Rico, many individuals receive a W2-PR to file their tax returns. This form includes multiple fields with personal information, such as the taxpayer’s Social Security number, which CPAs usually have to type manually into their tax software. That’s where we come in. We use a platform powered by OCR technology to automate and streamline the process of transferring taxpayer data into our online platform.
How does it work?
We feed and train the tool with informative tax forms (informativas), which are documents containing taxpayer information that report income. OCR then organizes the data into the correct fields within Expert Tax, saving our clients time and effort.
The tool is fully integrated with Expert Tax. All you need to do is upload the informativas, and the system will read them and place the information into the correct fields.
Validate your information
Since this is a recently implemented technology, it’s not perfect—it’s an ongoing process. That’s why it’s very important to review and validate that all the information in your tax returns is correct.
The tool is not absolute, and you always have the ability to edit the data if something is incorrect.
This feature has greatly simplified the data entry process for our clients, and many have expressed their satisfaction with it!
Which forms are currently supported?
At the moment, the following forms are available for use with OCR:
- 499R-2/W-PR
- 480.6A
- 480.6B
- 480.6C
- 480.6D
- 480.6EC
- 480.6F
- 480.6G
- 480.6SP
- 480.7
Learn more
Check out our webinar: Get to Know the Individual Module and How to Import Your Data into Expert Tax, where we demonstrate how to import data into Expert Tax using OCR.
You can also visit our Information Center and read the OCR manual. For any questions, please contact our Support Team, and we’ll be happy to assist you as soon as possible.