The present disclosure is generally directed to systems and methods for executing optical character recognition faster than at least some traditional OCR systems, without sacrificing recognition accuracy. Towards this end, various exemplary embodiments involve the use of a bounding box and a grid-based template to identify certain unique aspects of each of various characters and/or numerals. For example, in one embodiment, the grid-based template can be used to recognize a numeral and/or a character based on a difference in centerline height between the numeral and the character when a monospaced font is used. In another exemplary embodiment, the grid-based template can be used to recognize an individual digit among a plurality of digits based on certain parts of the individual digit being uniquely located in specific portions of the grid-based template.