To provide a character reading method and a carrier sheet for efficiently reading an atypical business form and manageming its recognition information.

This character reading method has steps of: optically reading a surface of a carrier sheet with a reading surface of the business form held on the carrier sheet at a surface-contact state to input reading information; recognizing the reading information of the optically read business form; recording the recognized information about the business form and performing prescribed printing on the business form held on the carrier sheet at the surface-contact state based on the recognized information on the business form.