I was wondering if anyone has ever tried this before.  I need to import about 20 ledgers into Filemaker.  This would obviously be very expensive if someone had to type out all of the pages line by line, (I would say 6 months of work).  Does anyone here know of a means of scanning it into filemaker or Excel in order to create the database that we need?

With typed or computer printed material scanning and OCR is fairly accurate though still needs reviewing and correcting. Handwritten material is way harder because handwriting can be very hard to discern, even for humans. Humans can deduct illegible parts by looking at content around it, which is much harder for computers.

Even if you did get reasonably correct imports you'd have to check everything anyway for accuracy.

I'd do some trials scanning the material and OCRing it. With ledgers, you can't really have mistakes as that throws all the figures out. OCRing stories is much more forgiving as people can deduct incorrect words, but incorrect numbers throw your entire ledger.

Probably the way I'd do it if it really must be converted into a DB, is to scan each page into a container, and accompany it with some fields that specify the totals of each page (or other significant info). That will allow you to do calculations and review the scanned copies if need be.