A failing OCR tool made me take handwritten notes seriously again

Last week my receipt scanning app turned a $4.75 grocery bill into $475.00 and auto-filed it under 'contractor expenses'. I spent two hours fixing the mess it made in my accounting sheet. That was the moment I stopped trusting the convenience and started testing every OCR output against the original photo. Turns out the cheap scanner app I used for 8 months was fine for clear print but terrible with my cursive notes or crumpled receipts. I went back to writing down important numbers by hand first, then using OCR only as a backup. Has anyone else had an AI tool fail so badly it made you more skeptical of the whole category?

2 comments

2 Comments

fiona_carr2623d ago

Oh man, that 475 dollar receipt thing gave me a flashback. My old car's mileage tracker once logged a trip to the corner store as a 900 mile road trip to Vegas. I only caught it because the gas receipt for my actual car didn't match the math at all. I spent a whole evening trying to undo the damage before realizing the app had been quietly messing up my log for months. Honestly, I think the trick is never to trust any tool with your baseline numbers. I still use that tracker sometimes, but I write the odometer reading on a sticky note in my glovebox first. Maybe that's just me being paranoid, but your mileage may vary.

emmaking25d ago

Wait, did you actually test the OCR against the original photo every time before you fixed the spreadsheet, or did you just eyeball the big numbers? Because two hours of fixing sounds like you caught it late, not early. I'm curious if you changed your whole workflow or just started double checking the scary stuff like totals and dates. Also, what made you trust it for eight months before this, was it always sloppy or did something change with an update? Cause if it worked fine before and just broke, that's a different problem than it never being good.