[Mageia-discuss] Reading payment forms with a scanner

[Jan Ciger]

On Thu, Feb 14, 2013 at 11:08 AM, Morgan Leijström <fri at tribun.eu> wrote:

> With the risk of sounding grumpy i suggest to hammer your payment provider
> to
> fix their bug.
>
> I think no solution that include scanning is less time consuming than proof
> read manually typed number.
> Besises, you need to proof read the scan anyway ;)
>

Actually, there are solutions that are virtually error-proof. However, that
assumes that the banks and the issuers of the bills work together. I have
lived for several years in Switzerland and there the payment slips are
completely standardized, in machine readable form. Every bill you get is
using one of these. I think Juergen is talking about those, considering he
is in Geneva. The Swiss slips have a long code on them that indicates who
is recipient of the payment, the sum, the identification of the bill (e.g.
a facture number or month number if it is something like rent) and a
checksum. So the chance that the machine would accept an incorrect code is
virtually nil.

Swiss banks offer either a portable reader that you can use with
internetbanking or there are self-service kiosks in the branches where you
can pay these by simply scanning them in the machine. Unless the slip was
dirty or excessively wrinkled, I have never had a single issue in the 4
years I lived there, the reading and the checks against your account are
very robust. It was so convenient that I have often walked to the UBS
branch office on the campus after work to use the kiosk rather then be
bothered with retyping at home (I didn't have the portable scanner). You
log into the machine with your credit card (or account card), scan all the
slips, click approve, go home. In Juergen's place I would go and talk to
the bank - I am sure they offer this sort of slip scanner and e.g. UBS (one
of the major Swiss banks) has even a cellphone app for it.

However, if you want to do this as something general, where the slips
aren't standard (e.g. here in France) or the fields are not in standard
places - that is pretty much hopeless. Doublechecking the scans and then
somehow integrating it into the internetbanking would be really hard and
fragile thing to do. You are better off with setting up automatic debit
authorizations and not bothering with slips in that case.

Regards,

J.
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