An optical image of a check submitted to a business as part a check-based financial transaction is obtained and the optical image of the check is scanned using Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology to obtain optical image-based financial transaction data. The optical image-based financial transaction data is then used to automatically match, or correlate, the check to a customer account and/or invoice and, pending user review and/or approval, a payment entry is automatically generated and the check-based payment represented by the check is automatically credited to the customer account and the customer account balance is transformed to reflect the check-based payment, and/or the status of an associated invoice is transformed to reflect the check-based payment, e.g., the invoice is marked as paid, or partially paid.