FEB 15, 2026
8 min read
Building the OCR Engine
Tech Team
Outlay Team
The Challenge with Thermal Receipts
Indian merchant receipts are notoriously difficult to parse. Between faded thermal ink, non-standard layouts, and a mix of English and regional languages, standard OCR solutions consistently fail.
Our Multi-Modal Approach
Instead of relying on basic text extraction, we implemented a multi-modal AI approach. We pass both the image and the raw text to a fine-tuned Gemini model that acts as a structural parser.
This allows Outlay to reliably identify the Merchant Name, Date, Total Amount, and even split out the GST amounts automatically.
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