[Mageia-discuss] Reading payment forms with a scanner

[Jan Ciger]

On Fri, Feb 15, 2013 at 7:52 AM, Juergen Harms <juergen.harms at unige.ch>wrote:

> A positive remark about swiss banks! But errorproofness for swiss payment
> slips is also quite relative: (a) the long reference digit chains only have
> a very simple longitudinal 1-digit checksum that catches many, but not all
> errors that happen if you key them in manually and (b) all the OCR pograms
> that I have tested are far from perfect. And yes, for some time I tried to
> use one of these portable devices - they accumulate limited quality of
> scanning with limited quality of OCR conversion: between handling and
> checking I spent more time than I need for manual input and verification.
>

OK, quite possible. I haven't tried those myself, I had only experience
with the kiosks which work excellently. However, there the system does
cross-check the scanned data against the various databases (e.g. valid
account numbers) as well.


>
> My recent error scenario illustrates this: my incorrectly keyed in digit
> string happened to not trigger a checksum error, hence was accepted by the
> ebanking system of my bank, but was then rejected by the destination bank
> because the string did not make sense to them.
>

Arg. That's pain, indeed.


>
> Generalisation: maybe the concepts I put to work allow to create similar
> tools / adjust the one I have made. I live part of my time in Austria -
> Austrian slips should not be too difficult to handle along such lines. And,
> maybe the mandatory introduction of IBAN input will create an incentive to
> banks to improve the readability of their slips.


That I doubt - if the slips aren't standardized, whether or not an IBAN is
there makes little difference :( Moreover, unlike Switzerland where the
banks actually do work together somewhat, it is still a wild west elsewhere.

In Slovakia where I am from these slips are actually managed by the Post,
originally as a mean to send money by post (you send a slip instead of
cash) - that is what most people would know as a "check" there (classic
personal checks were not used since the WWII or so). The Post has machines
to automatically scan these. However, most companies send you a bill and
either don't attach the slip (most banks don't accept them anyway, only the
Post) or you must fill part of it by hand anyway.

In Denmark you even have an option for the bills/slips to arrive directly
to your account with your bank, then you can pay them with a click of a
mouse if you don't have an automatic debit agreement.

So I guess that it would always have to be an ad-hoc, country-specific
hack.

Regards,

Jan
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