Docyield's business card scanner turns a photo of a card into a usable contact. Snap or upload the card and you get back the person's name, job title, company, email, phone and mobile numbers, fax, website, and address as JSON, CSV, or Excel — sorted into fields you can drop straight into your address book or CRM. The stack of cards that has been sitting in a drawer since the last conference becomes a clean contact list in a few minutes.
Business cards are some of the most varied documents around. Designers rotate text, set names in stylised fonts, scatter contact details across both sides, and pack multiple phone numbers onto a sliver of card stock. A template-based reader has no hope against that range. Docyield interprets each card by what the text means — recognising an email, telling a job title from a company name — so it reads creative layouts as confidently as a plain one.
What a business card scanner pulls out
The whole point of a business card is the contact behind it, so the scanner focuses on exactly the fields a contact record needs: the full name, the job title or role, the company, the email address, the office phone and a separate mobile if the card lists one, a fax number where it still appears, the website, and the postal address. Each lands in its own field, so the mobile is never mistaken for the office line and the website never ends up glued to the email.
Keeping the office phone and the mobile apart matters more than it sounds. Many cards print several numbers — main line, direct dial, cell — and a flat transcript leaves you guessing which is which. By separating them, Docyield produces a contact you can act on immediately rather than a block of text you still have to dissect.
Why structured fields beat raw OCR
Run plain OCR over a card and you get its text in roughly reading order, which on a creatively laid-out card can be close to nonsense: the tagline above the name, the company split across two lines, three phone numbers in a row with no labels. Turning that into a contact still falls to you.
Structured extraction does the sorting. The name, title, company, and each contact channel come back as named fields, so importing into a CRM or contacts app becomes a direct mapping rather than a parsing exercise. Because the field names are stable across every card, a hundred cards produce a hundred uniform records instead of a hundred little cleanup jobs.
Export to your contacts or CRM
The most common reason to scan a card is to get the person into a system you actually use, and structured fields make that painless. Export to CSV or Excel and the columns line up with what contact managers and CRMs expect on import — name, company, title, email, phone — so a tool like Salesforce, HubSpot, or your phone's address book can map them in a few clicks.
If you are wiring scanning into your own product, the JSON output drops straight into a create-contact call, with each field already named to match. Either way, the work of turning a photographed card into a saved contact comes down to an upload and an import, not an afternoon of typing.
Who uses a business card scanner
- Salespeople clearing a stack of cards from a trade show into the CRM the same week.
- Recruiters and business-development teams logging contacts met at events and meetings.
- Founders and consultants keeping a tidy address book without manual data entry.
- Office and reception staff digitising visitor and supplier cards into a shared directory.
- Developers adding a scan-a-card-to-contact feature to an app through the API.
Accuracy, limitations, and review
No scanner reads every card perfectly, and the trickiest cards are exactly the ones designers are proudest of. Foil or embossed lettering, low-contrast text on a dark background, tiny type, and busy graphics all make characters harder to read. A flat, sharp, well-lit photo of the card gives the best result, and if the card has details on the back, scanning both sides captures everything.
Where a field is not on the card — plenty of cards skip the fax or the mobile — Docyield leaves it empty rather than inventing one. Email addresses and phone numbers are worth a quick glance before you import, since a single transposed digit or character matters for a contact, but checking a couple of fields is far faster than typing the whole card.
Languages, double-sided cards, and edge cases
Cards turn up in many languages and often print the same details twice — one side in English, the other in the local script. Docyield reads the text in context rather than assuming a layout, so bilingual and non-Latin cards are handled, and you can scan each side and merge the results when a card splits its information.
Unusual touches that throw template readers — a QR code in place of a URL, a job title that spans two lines, or social handles mixed in with the phone numbers — are interpreted by meaning instead of position. The result is a contact that reflects what the card says, not just where the ink happened to fall.
Output formats and scaling up
Every scan exports as JSON, CSV, Excel, or XML from the same result. CSV and Excel suit anyone building a contact list for import; JSON suits developers pushing contacts into an app; XML covers older systems. The free tool reads one card at a time, which is fine for the occasional card.
When you have a whole event's worth to get through, the Docyield API and batch dashboard return the same schema you see here, so you can process many cards, receive results by webhook, and feed them into your CRM automatically. The field names do not change between the free tool and the paid plans.
What the business card scanner extracts
Each card is returned against a fixed schema, with values transcribed as printed. Fields the card does not include come back empty rather than guessed.
- Full name
- The person's full name.
- Job title
- The person's role or job title.
- Company
- The company or organisation name.
- The email address on the card.
- Phone
- The primary or office phone number.
- Mobile
- The mobile number, when listed separately from the office line.
- Fax
- The fax number, when the card prints one.
- Website
- The website or URL.
- Address
- The postal or office address.
How to scan a business card into a contact
- 1Upload the card — drop a PDF, PNG, JPG, or WEBP onto the box above, or click to choose a file.
- 2Use a flat, sharp, well-lit photo; if the card has details on the back, scan that side too.
- 3Wait a moment while Docyield reads the card and sorts the details into fields.
- 4Review the result, glancing over the email and phone numbers before you save them.
- 5Choose CSV or Excel to import into your contacts or CRM, or JSON to push into your own app.
Frequently asked questions
Processing documents at scale?
Batch upload, an extraction API, and webhooks for 100+ documents a month.