Sitting on the floor surrounded by hundreds of paper receipts and invoices, Jim was not thrilled by the task ahead: preparing tax filings for his husband’s architecture firm, Kevin O’Sullivan + Associates.  He needed to enter all of the documents and then categorize, attach them to billable clients, and create a Schedule C report for a real-world business. It’s a challenge every company has faced since the first days of commerce.

Jim Thomas is one of the payments industry’s leading data innovators. He launched Mastercard’s payments data business, which harnessed big data tools and early data science to create significant value from its transaction information. Jim was an advocate that data processed by companies was a valuable asset, not a zero-value byproduct. He has advised global banks, clearinghouses, and other payment networks on information product and monetization strategies.

Jim founded Itemize to extract inaccessible but valuable information from receipts and invoices. Once captured, the details automatically transform into vital data sets for accounting, tax, and other financial systems. This transformation requires accurately reading critical information from both paper and digital documents with minimal human intervention.

The Itemize team combined several emerging technologies to power its processing system, including optical character recognition (OCR), computer vision, natural language processing, machine learning, and artificial intelligence (AI). In conjunction with big data sets and partnerships, the system can achieve unparalleled accuracy, precision, and speed.

Since its inception, Itemize’s engine has processed over 20 million documents from countries around the world.

Schedule C tax returns for the architecture firm today are a lot easier, thanks to Itemize and Jim’s spark of innovation.

Related Post

Cookie-less visit tracking