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Hello folks,

I’m looking for a scanner with a top loader function (stack the bills into the printer and it should process every single sheet automatically).
The background of it: the accounting department needs a device like this, the information on the bills
(text and numbers) should be transferred into the accounting application.

How is such a device called? Or is there periphery on the market to attach to a regular office printer?
Manufacturer and model suggestions are greatly appreciated!

Thanks in advance!

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Does the application itself have the facility to take the input from a scanner and process the data into the correct fields? The scanner will produce an image for each bill, which will, in effect, be a photograph of the bill. That photograph needs to be processed and the data extracted. That needs OCR. The characters read from the image then need to be parsed for information, such as account number, value,etc. that match the fields used by the Accounting application. The data then has to be input to the application’s database. If the application cannot handle this itself, you will need a system that sits between the scanner and the application, that can read the bills, parse them for the information, and then feed it to the accounts application, in a way that the application can accept.

We need a lot more information before we can point you to a sensible answer.

What is the accounting application?

How many bills are we talking about?

Is this a one-off exercise to clear a backlog, or an ongoing operation?

Are all the bills identical?

Are they printed or handwritten?

Are they all completed correctly, or are there errors that will need to be handled? - If so, few enough to be handled manually, or so many that it has to be automated?

Where has the request come from? Is this an official project that will get budgetary approval, or just from Pete in accounts who is tired of typing in the bills manually?

A complete system to scan, process, parse, format and create a file for bulk upload into the accounts application could well cost 10’s of thousands of dollars.

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Thanks for your answer!

The project is officially approved by the CFO, who contacted me directly, but I think a solution which costs tens of thousands of dollars would be a massive overkill.

The application is “BMD”, one of the bigger accounting softwares in Europe/the German speaking part of Europe, which has that function incorporated (scan to application import).
At the moment it is being scanned by a multifunctional printer with scanning function. We are talking hundreds of printed bills which are not identical. The errors can be corrected manually, as it has been done until now (which works surprisingly fine). So from the application POV it is pretty set, now I’m just looking for the appropriate hardware to implement for ongoing operations.
I was asked to find a solution - which is more about convenience and efficiency , rather than finding “a fully automated super industry 4.0 solution”.

The accountant should be able to stack at least dozens of bills into the printer, without having to insert every single page separately.

Thanks again and have a nice weekend!

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We use Fujitsu ScanSnap units throughout our Accounting department for this sort of thing.

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One more point for Fujitsu… But I would use fi series… I have had great experiense working with them…
They have a good functionality to auto crop pages, they work great with different paper sizes at once, they load paper well, etc…

Fujitsu fi series was recomended to me years ago by a company that develops software for document digitalisation for erp systems (just like you, invoices, incoming paper post, etc…) and is their go-to brand…

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Get a dedicated scanner.

You should contact the software vendor to see if they have a supported hardware list.

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Fujitsu or HP. We have a client using a pair of HP 8500 FN1s and they work great. They are around 4 years old and have scanned about 2 million pages per machine.

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Good. It looks like a fairly straightforward job then.

Fujitsu do have a good reputation for this sort of thing, but I agree with Tulio. See what the software vendor or authors recommend.