How to make a document of scanned checks searchable

Hi Knsap,

You are correct, if the check is just a picture of a check, there's nothing to read.

In addition, if there are written words, cannot be translated with OCR.

HOWEVER, if everything in the check printed, no handwriting there is a way.

First make all the separate PDF-checks into one PDF-check. You can do this by combining them all into one check. If you want you can break them into weeks, months, or the year. Keep in mind that if you have twelve documents (one for each month), you'll have to do twelve searches. 

Now, open that document (you'll have to do this part separately for each document).

Now, select the "Scan & OCR" work tab, click on the dropdown menu for Recognize Text, and finally tap the Recognize Text button.

Now when you search for words, you'll be searching in all of the checks in that document.

Here's where I dump some water on this parade: Depending on how the scan was done, there can be considerable variabilities to the quality of the resultant OCR. Simply, the worse the quality of the scan, the worse the quality of the OCR. There's no use doing a search for "Joe's Business" if the text was understood to be "Joes Busmess." (Letter combinations like "in" often come out as "m." If the bank did the scanning, I can guarantee that that they did not scan with the intent for quality OCR. Rather, they scanned for the record of the scan. If it's anything like the scanned checks I get from my bank, I wouldn't even try to OCR them.

Sorry, good luck.