Melbourne-based financial accounting firm Krigsman Partners has revolutionised its document processing with the deployment of ABBYY FineReader 14.

As a firm providing a broad range of legal and advisory consulting services, Krigsman Partners works with a wide variety of documents including trust deeds, contracts and other legal documentation.

The firm sought a comprehensive tool to accurately convert PDFs and other scanned images into editable and searchable formats for editing and storing.

Trials of other software tools they found them slow at processing large complex documents offering unintuitive interfaces and cumbersome operation

Shortly after trialling ABBYY FineReader 14 Corporate, Krigsman Partners purchased a volume license for every member of the organisation, establishing FineReader as the default PDF tool within the organisation.

FineReader is able to merge, edit and convert PDF documents. It also contains OCR functionality which can pre-process scanned images as well as photos of documents taken with a mobile phone.

The dedicated OCR interface ensures that document format conversion is performed as smoothly as possible. Importantly this process could be automated with the ‘Hot Folder’ feature that automatically processed desired documents within an assigned location.

FineReader’s Document Comparison tool is also highly valued with the ability to speedily compare documents of various formats, such as an image only PDF against a Microsoft Word document in the same window.

Tasks that used to take an employee a full day can now be accomplished in seconds. A good example is a recent task to compare two versions of a trust deed - one from the 1980s and one from 2000. The documents were over 40 pages in length.

Before the firm deployed FineReader 14, someone would have to compare the documents side by side, find all the differences and changes made to either document, a process that could take a full day. With ABBYY FineReader, the firm was able to complete the task in seconds.

It enables staff reviewing changes in legal documents or comparing balance sheets and financial reports to quickly spot differences in updated versions.

Financial organisations are typically slow to embrace new technology. With the amount of time saved using FineReader, Krigsman Partners believes it now enjoys a significant competitive advantage.

“ABBYY FineReader provides us with the flexibility we need for the large volume of legal and tax documentation our office receives. We can export documents quickly to any format and search, edit and email with minimal fuss. It is an essential business product for our business,” said Robert Krigsman, Principal Partner, Krigsman Partners.