Greek receipt OCR
Two alphabets, one shape.
Fourteen Greek capitals are drawn exactly like Latin ones and share none of their character codes. A Cyprus receipt can be read letter-perfectly into the wrong alphabet and nothing on the screen looks wrong, which is how supplier names end up half-transliterated and one supplier ends up as two.
The letters that are two letters
Same picture. Different character.
Each pair below is drawn identically in this typeface and in the one on your client’s till roll. The codes underneath are what actually gets stored.
- ΑU+0391AU+0041
- ΒU+0392BU+0042
- ΕU+0395EU+0045
- ΖU+0396ZU+005A
- ΗU+0397HU+0048
- ΙU+0399IU+0049
- ΚU+039AKU+004B
- ΜU+039CMU+004D
- ΝU+039DNU+004E
- ΟU+039FOU+004F
- ΡU+03A1PU+0050
- ΤU+03A4TU+0054
- ΥU+03A5YU+0059
- ΧU+03A7XU+0058
Greek 14 pairsLatin 14 pairs
Which makes some words unreadable on sight.
A word whose every letter is one of those pairs carries nothing that says which alphabet it belongs to. A word with even one unmistakably Greek letter settles it immediately.
| As printed | Meaning | Letters that could only be Greek |
|---|---|---|
| ΤΑΧΙ | Taxi | none |
| ΝΕΡΟ | Water | none |
| ΚΑΘΑΡΗ | Net value | Θ |
| ΣΥΝΟΛΟ | Total | Σ Λ |
| ΦΠΑ | VAT | Φ Π |
Read as Greek
ΤΑΧΙ
U+03A4 U+0391 U+03A7 U+0399
Read as Latin
TAXI
U+0054 U+0041 U+0058 U+0049
Characters in common: 0
These two are the same picture, they mean the same thing, and they have not one character in common. Grouped by name, they are two suppliers.
Greek in, clean workbook out.
ΦΠΑ phrasing, understood.
«Συμπεριλαμβανομένου ΦΠΑ», «πλέον ΦΠΑ», «ΦΠΑ 19%», the phrases that decide whether a total already contains the VAT. Pileform tags every total as inclusive or exclusive based on what the document actually says, and preserves the source phrase in the workbook for audit.
Greek and English on the same receipt.
A Cyprus supplier invoice with a Greek header, English line items, and a bilingual VAT summary is normal paper here. The extractor handles mixed-script documents line by line, no language toggle, no separate batches per language.
Cyprus and Greece rates, native.
Cyprus 19 / 9 / 5 / 3 / 0 and Greece 24 / 13 / 6 are both in the engine, applied per line from what the receipt prints. A rate printed on the document is never overridden; a missing rate is inferred and yellow-flagged for review.
The whole period, one drop.
Not photo-by-photo capture. Scan the pile into one PDF, hundreds of pages, mixed suppliers and languages, and drop it once. A typical 200-page batch processes in about 12 minutes; you get an email when the workbook is ready.
Greek sources, your headers.
Workbook headers come out in your firm's configured language; the source words stay in Greek where the document was Greek, preserved in cell comments for audit. One workbook per supplier, with the original receipt image embedded next to its rows.
Greek receipt OCR questions, answered.
Partially. Printed and thermal-printed documents are the focus, and that is where the extraction is strong. Handwritten items, the classic Greek taxi slip, are attempted and retried automatically, but anything the engine is not confident about comes back yellow-flagged for human review rather than silently guessed. You will know exactly which rows to check.
Handled natively. Mixed-script documents, Greek header, English line items, bilingual VAT summaries, are read line by line without any language setting. The engine reads 11 languages and detects the language per line, not per document.
Yes. Greece’s VAT rates (24% standard, 13% and 6% reduced) are supported the same way as Cyprus’s 19 / 9 / 5 / 3 / 0, applied per line from the printed rate, with inference flagged. Greek-language documents behave identically regardless of which side of the Aegean they came from.
Yes. Bank statements go into the same period drop as the receipts and invoices, and transactions come out as double-entry rows reconciled within the same workbook. Greek-language statement layouts from Cyprus banks are part of normal processing.
Scan or collect the period’s documents into one PDF, order and orientation do not need to be perfect, and upload it. Pileform processes pages in parallel, retries the hard ones, and emails you when the workbook is ready. A typical 200-page batch takes about 12 minutes; larger batches finish overnight.
Built in Cyprus, on Greek paper.
Create an account with 30 non-expiring signup pages, no card required. Use them to test Pileform with your own documents before choosing a subscription.
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