Edit, orient, compress, crop, annotate, receipt images
Simply put, integrate technology like what is involved with iPhone scanner applications. Users can be pretty boneheaded often. They also don't all have the same understanding for technology. The software should make things super simple for them; idiot proof.
You guys already have some great OCR tech going on in the receipt scanning capability you've integrated, but you aren't using it to assist with receipt image adjustments. Users upload all kinds of crazy crap, from images that are 90% desktop and 10% receipt, to blurry and unreadable, to skewed (off-angle) images, to super large 100MB+ image files. They simply don't understand enough of the tech involved to take a picture, crop it, reduce it down in size, rotate it slightly (or 90 degrees), lighten/darken, etc. They should know how to do this, as I believe pretty much all current smartphones include image editing in the OS of the phone. Users just don't know it's there or how to access it in a lot of cases. The typical user seems to be talented enough to take a picture and somehow get it into Zoho Expense, but that's about it.
How about you guys use your OCR tech and software building skills to adjust receipt images, straighten them up, detect when they are fuzzy or out of focus and reject them, compress them, etc. It would also be super helpful if you would add some elementary annotation creation ability, like drawing boxes around charges, names and dates on the receipt to aid the reviewer in quickly finding the relevant information. We do this manually prior to uploading our direct-bill receipts. Our customers have requested that we annotate the receipts to make charges easier to identify. Would be great to see even some of this implemented. As is currently, we spend a lot of time coaching our users on proper expense image editing/uploading.
Ryan Partin
shared this idea
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Robin W
commented
I have discovered a very simple way for Zoho to take a step in the right direction here. It is not available yet as a mobile App but Zoho already has a great image annotation app for PC called Zoho Annotator. It can be added as a Google Chrome extension and provides great image annotation capabilities. Once added as a Chrome extension, when viewing or editing Zoho expenses it is possible to right-click any receipt attached to an expense and immediately launch Zoho Annotator to edit it. The only thing missing is that once you have finished editing, it is necessary to save the annotated image and re-attach it to the associated expense as a new receipt.
All Zoho needs to do is directly link Zoho Expense to the Zoho Annotator tool to integrate the editing of receipts (right-click any receipt and annotate as before), but on completion, allow the annotated receipt to be saved back to the expense directly without the need to reattach it. -
Tiberiu Ghiță-Istrate
commented
(within the mobile Expense app) edge detection and contrast sharpening would be nice
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Robin W
commented
I would particularly like to see a basic image editing tool to allow receipt annotation. Sometimes the expense to be claimed is mixed up within a longer receipt. Users currently have to manually write on the receipt prior to scanning and uploading which spoils the receipt. Post upload annotation would be a big improvement.