Millions of financial transactions take place every day. Associated with them are documents such as bank cheques, payment slips and bills which have to be processed. A great deal of time, effort and money will be saved if they can be entered into the computer and processed automatically. According to the specific characteristics of financial documents, it can be concluded that it is possible to build a system for recognizing specific types of financial documents, instead of a complex and general one aiming at different kinds of documents. In this paper, a financial document recognition prototype system which can process bank cheques, payment ships and bills, is presented. It consists of four major parts: (a) document image acquisition including scanning and binarization, (b) fixed document processing subsystem based on the detection of staff lines, (c) flexible document processing subsystem operating in a form description language (FDL), and (d) character recognition. Numerous experimental results are presented and discussed. © 1995 IEEE