IMAGE-BASED DOCUMENT PROCESSING SYSTEM PROVIDING FOR PRIORITY DOCUMENT SHIPMENT

A method for obtaining priority document shipment in an image-based transaction processing system, wherein each transaction comprises a plurality of debit and credit documents which should be balanced. Images of documents are captured while sorting the documents into groups in accordance with document shipment. The captured images are then viewed for extracting amount data. The extracted amount data is used for identifying out-of-balance transactions. When a group is selected for priority document shipment, only those document images from the selected group which are also part of an out-of-balance transaction are viewed again, a previously extracted amount from a document being changed if the amount extracted as a result of this additional viewing causes the corresponding transaction to balance.