How much time do you spend processing invoices, purchase orders, applications, and other forms? Do your employees still manually collect your documents and re-type information into your ERP? If you’re spending too many resources on data entry, OCR form processing software can help.
How Does OCR Form Processing Work?
OCR software processes documents almost the same way that you do. Robotic Process Automation (RPA) technology utilizes “robots” to perform these tasks faster and more efficiently. Using advanced optical character recognition technologies, it can “read” both printed and handwritten text, as well as checkboxes and barcodes. This allows it to identify values such as:
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- Names
- Phone numbers
- Physical addresses
- Unit of measure
- Item numbers
- Quantities
- Prices
- Description
Once this information has been extracted from a form, it can be used for a variety of other purposes. For instance, it can be saved into a database, or it can be exported as a searchable file.
IntelliChief’s form processing software lets you go one step further, using your information to automate corresponding workflows. For instance, you can use data to quickly generate a sales order or invoice voucher. This saves you from having to start all your business processes by manually entering data.
Processing Structured vs. Unstructured Forms
Forms can be classified as either “structured” or “unstructured”. With structured forms, the same information is always in the same place. (For instance, the address field is always in the top left corner.) Structured forms are relatively straightforward to process.
Unstructured forms, on the other hand, don’t always contain the same information in the same place. Some invoices, for instance, have the vendor’s contact information on the top right side, while others place it at the very bottom.
Both types of forms can be processed with OCR software. However, a more advanced approach is necessary when dealing with unstructured forms, where the program has to locate key information across multiple pages and layouts.
How Fast Can You Process Forms With Character Recognition Software?
When you process a form by hand, you can expect to spend about five minutes reading, re-typing, and saving all the data. That number can go up for longer or more complicated documents, like multi-page invoices.
When you use optical character recognition tools to streamline the process, you can have the entire process done in seconds. In some cases, it’s possible to have a form completely processed without any user intervention. Considering that most companies that use OCR software to process their forms complete between 100 and 500 documents per day, the savings can be significant.
How Accurate Is OCR Form Processing?
Of course, data automation software is only useful if it’s accurate. But, even the most advanced programs aren’t 100 percent accurate, 100 percent of the time.
The key is to determine what sort of confidence percentages you feel comfortable with, then use that as a guideline for your software. You can let your program automatically import data that it is 90 or 95 percent confident that it has correctly identified, then notify an employee to review the rest of the document. With IntelliChief Capture Enterprise, any value that falls outside of these confidence levels is clearly highlighted, making the manual review process quick and easy.
Compared to manual data entry, OCR offers a significant improvement in both speed and accuracy. This translates to an immediate increase in productivity – even if you don’t change anything else about the way you process your documents.
Discover IntelliChief’s OCR Technologies
Ready to streamline your workflows? IntelliChief can help. Our Capture Enterprise OCR form processing software can integrate with your existing business systems, and can be used in countless ways – from straight-through invoice processing to order processing.
What’s more, it’s much easier to use than other OCR programs. You can:
- Add vendors without any custom coding or IT intervention
- Notify users when a document needs a manual review
- Send processed forms directly into your business-specific workflows or ERP in real-time
- Quickly “clean up” documents to improve their quality prior to processing
