On Classifying Digital Accounting Documents

Advances in computing and multimedia technologies allow many accountingdocuments to be digitized within little cost for effective storage and access. Moreover, the amountof accounting documents is increasing rapidly, this leads to the need of developing somemechanisms to effectively manage those (semi-structured) digital accounting documents for futureaccounting information systems (AIS). In general, accounting documents contains such asinvoices, purchase orders, checks, photographs, charts, diagrams, etc. As a result, the majorfunctionality of future AIS is to automatically classify digital accounting documents into differentcategories in an effective manner. The aim of this paper is to examine flat non-hierarchical andhierarchical classification schemes for automatic classification of different types of digitalaccounting documents. The experimental results show that non-hierarchical classification ofdigital accounting documents performs better than hierarchically classifying digital accountingdocuments.