If you sell at Costco, you know the routine: every business day a fax arrives with consignment sales figures for every warehouse location. ZenShows reads it, extracts the numbers store by store, and posts your sales data automatically. No manual entry, no transcription, no spreadsheets.
We’ve been quietly making that process more reliable with each generation of the scanning engine. Version 5 is now live — and it’s the biggest accuracy jump we’ve shipped.
The numbers
We ran a 100-fax regression test: real Costco faxes, re-processed through v5, scored against the checksums printed on each fax. A scan only passes when every store’s unit counts and dollar totals match the fax exactly.
| v1 | v2 | v3 | v4 | v5 | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Pass rate | 17% | 53% | 76% | 85% | 97.8% |
98 of 100 faxes scored 100% confidence — meaning every store verified and the grand totals matched. The 2 that didn’t are severely garbled OCR cases where multiple fields on a single store’s row are simultaneously unreadable; those still route to manual review, same as before.
What changed under the hood
The core upgrade in v5 is self-checking. After reading a fax, the engine now reconciles every store’s extracted figures against the checksum totals printed on the fax itself — the same arithmetic a human reviewer would use to confirm the numbers are right. If a row doesn’t add up, v5 has several recovery paths to fix it before anything gets posted.
That meant building better handling for a few specific failure modes that were responsible for most of the v4 misses:
Returns and credits. Stores that only show negative quantities — a return week with no positive sales — were previously flagged as errors because the system expected every store to have positive totals. v5 recognizes returns-only stores and verifies them correctly as long as the fax grand total still balances.
Large multi-page faxes. A busy sales day can mean 80+ warehouse locations spread across multiple fax pages. v5 keeps every store’s rows intact across page boundaries, including locations that don’t get their own per-store total line on the fax.
Comma-formatted dollar amounts. Some fax layouts format dollar figures with commas (e.g. 1,234.56) where others don’t. v5 handles both formats reliably without misreading the comma as a field separator.
What this means day-to-day
More of your daily Costco sales data will post fully automatically without needing a second look. The days where a scan came back flagged for review — and someone had to manually verify or re-trigger it — should happen significantly less often.
Every scan still gets a confidence score. If a fax does come in below 100%, you’ll see it flagged in the Data Entry section so you know exactly which day to check, rather than discovering a gap later.
No action required. v5 is active now for all incoming faxes. Your next business day’s data will be processed with the new engine automatically.