Most of the printed matter we get is standard three-column A4-size bank statements for which we use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) on a flatbed scanner. We get the occasional credit card statement without any running total, and our own bank statements, which we receive once a month, happen to be in A5 format.
We could scan A5 format by rotating it before and after scanning, but this is quite a bit of faffing about. What we will do instead for both credit card statements and unusual bank statements is to scan them using an OCR pen scanner. Every February we will look on Amazon for the most recommended pen scanner, and try it out if it is different from last year. This year we have purchased a “Scanmarker” pen and it looks as if it will be able to do something useful. We will adapt our software to work with it.
Credit card statements and unusual bank statements we will collectively call “Irregular Printed Matter”. We don’t see that much of it, but it is nice to have a policy for dealing with it. At least we give the clerk more toys to play with, which takes the boredom out of accountancy.