Data Capture and Forms Processing

Data capture and forms processing involves scanning paper documents then extracting information from the scanned images so that it can be used within other business applications. This may be the automatic indexing of documents within a document management system, but could equally be the creation of spreadsheets or databases from the captured information.

Typical examples where form capture is useful are procesing purchase orders, market research documents, customer surveys, account application forms and invoices. OCR software can be configured to read your documents and convert the information you require into machine readable data that your computer understands.

Becker have worked on document scanning projects for Local and National companies who have achieved dramatic savings from our work. Data capture can provide sizable benefits to any company or department interested in streamlining their data entry process and reducing costs by eliminating time consuming and error prone manual data entry.

Recognition templates can be created to extract information from fixed areas on each document (fixed zone) or to locate information that can appear in different locations on each document (moving zone). The information can be printed or handwritten and ABBYY products currently support over 180 different languages.

The picture below shows a fixed zone ocr template.

This template is setup to read the customer name, invoice number and invoice date. The information in each area, highlighted by the green box, is in the same place on each document and the OCR software will accurately read this document.

Form Capture work flow

The image below shows the work flow used to scan and extract data from scanned documents or existing image files. The extracted data can be added to a database or saved in a variety of useful formats such as csv, xls, xml or searchable PDF etc. This level of document efficiency cannot be achieved using traditional methods of data capture.

Find out more about data capture products by clicking here