Automatic identification of bills is one of the important means of bill digitization and improving bill information processing ability. Considering the uniform specifications, the same structure and a large amount of duplicate information of the same type of bills, a bill recognition method based on template and content separation is proposed. In this method, the structure and inherent text of the bill are extracted as templates through color segmentation, and the rest is used as the content of the bill. Combined with the improved siamese neural network and template alignment, the bill template to be tested is matched with the existing bill in the template database, and then the new bill is reconstructed. The results show that compared with the original method Baidu OCR, the text detection time and recognition time of this method are reduced by 68% and 91.13% respectively, and the overall prediction time is reduced by 88.62%, reaching 3.45 seconds/piece.