Are you tired of the endless typing, deleting, and fixing mistakes, caused by manual data entry? If you run any kind of business, chances are you’re used to the slow and error-prone process of dealing with documents manually. It’s not just a hassle—it’s costing you. Errors from manual entry can lead to financial loss, inaccurate data, and decisions made based on the wrong information.
Fortunately, there’s a solution that allows you to put an end to this troublesome task. Automation, especially an Intelligent Document Processing solution, can streamline the data entry process and rid your employees of all shortcomings of manual data processing.
This article showcases how automated data entry can revolutionize the way your business handles documents efficiently. With automated processes, your team can break free from the tedious and error-prone data entry and focus on what truly matters. Let’s start!
What is Automated Data Entry?
Automated data entry means automatically transferring data into computer systems, databases, or spreadsheets without manual typing using AI-powered technologies that use Optical Character Recognition OCR.
One of the most used practices in automating data entry is employing an IDP solution, which not only streamlines data entry, but can automate the whole flow around data processing. By automating data entry, your organization can significantly reduce the time and resources it spends on manual data processing, leading to more efficient, accurate, and scalable operations.
Benefits of Data Entry Automation
To give you an overview of the advantages of automatic data entry, we have made a list of the most important benefits of automating data entry:
- Reduced Costs: Reduce operational costs by eliminating inefficient manual processes, as well as costs associated with repairing human errors in data entry.
- Increased Efficiency: Automation software works tirelessly, processing documents at a speed no human team can match, thus drastically reducing the data entry backlog. Automating data entry becomes a time-saving process across the whole organization.
- Enhanced Accuracy: AI technologies can achieve highly accurate rates, minimizing the errors associated with manual entry and establishing a fraud-free environment for your document management.
- Improved Employee Satisfaction: Relieving staff from the burden of data entry allows them to focus on more strategic, engaging, and value-adding activities.
- Scalability: Automation solutions easily scale with your business growth, handling increasing volumes of data by employing bulk processing.
- Compliance with Mandatory Regulations: Implementing data entry automation allows your business to verify documents and ensure regulatory compliance in KYC and AML checks, for instance.
How To Automate Data Entry
One of the most effective strategies for automating data entry is through the use of data entry software. These solutions can vary significantly in their capabilities, from the simple task of extracting data from a document to streamlining the whole document workflow.
Data entry automation employs a variety of technologies, all designed to facilitate the data entry process. Here are some of the widely-used technologies in automating data entry:
Optical Character Recognition
Optical Character Recognition (OCR) is at the backbone of every data entry automation solution. It helps extract data from images and documents and converts it to a machine-readable format, preparing it for further processing.
In case of specific line item extraction or key value pair extraction, zonal OCR is employed, which then captures only a specific part of the document.
Robotic Process Automation
Robotic Process Automation, or simply RPA, is a technology which leverages software bots and AI to automate manual tasks, such as data entry. Most commonly, this technology is employed when the use case involves financial data, such as invoices, receipts and other financial documents.
Image-to-Text Recognition
Image-to-text recognition allows you to extract data from images, using Machine Learning and AI technologies to do so. For the most accurate results, the image-to-text recognition solution performs image pre-processing, to enhance clarity and ensure that all of the data within a document is accurate.
Moreover, various capabilities, such as image clarification, lighting enhancer and user responsiveness, are all designed to increase the accuracy of data extraction and generate a reliable output.
Intelligent Character Recognition
Similar to the previously mentioned OCR, Intelligent Character Recognition is a technology used to extract information from various documents and scanned images. However, its main capability focuses on accurately extracting handwritten content and converting it to machine-readable format.
Intelligent Document Processing
An Intelligent Document Processing (IDP) does wonders for your document management. Besides extracting and processing your data, this technology has the power to automate your whole document workflow, from the moment you retrieve the document, to the moment you get the output.
IDP leverages OCR and AI, as well as ML, in order to be able to process a variety of documents at a larger scale. Since it employs multiple smart technologies, its capabilities also enhance with it. Be it bulk processing, line item extraction or document verification, IDP solution is the best choice.
With a designated data entry automation solution, your business can streamline this process for a variety of document types, as well as use cases. Curious to see some examples? Keep reading!
Use Cases of Automated Data Entry
Automating data entry benefits a large group of industries. Let’s approach this topic from a different perspective and take a look at some real-life applications of automating data entry:
- Invoice processing for accounts payable
- Purchase order processing
- Converting images to text
- Know Your Customer (KYC) automation
- Receipt clearing for loyalty programs
Invoice Processing for Accounts Payable
An automated accounts payable process relies on automatically extracting data from fields in supplier invoices and entering the information in ERP or bookkeeping software for accounting or financial purposes. Data entry automation with AI can also detect duplicates or fraudulent documents, therefore making your company aware of invoice fraud.
Purchase Order Processing
Keeping track of the purchase order process is easily done with automated data entry. The data is checked for validity and if it corresponds to the respective sale, using two-way matching. Automating data entry also means detecting whether the purchase order has been tampered with, avoiding vendor fraud.
Converting Images to Text
As lots of companies receive important information in the form of scanned images, automation can help them capture data efficiently, and most importantly, accurately. Organizations can turn images into text and extract the most important information from them in seconds.
Know Your Customer (KYC) Automation
KYC automation helps companies stay compliant with mandatory customer due diligence (CDD) practices, by checking that customers are who they claim to be and that they are not engaging in threatening or dangerous activities. With a thorough identity and document verification, companies ensure accurate KYC and AML checks, signaling for instance money laundering, terrorism financing, or illegal financial activities.
Checking customers’ identities is done by performing identity proofing. This means checking identity documents using intelligent document processing software, to make sure that their documents are valid and that their activities do not represent a risk for organizations.
Receipt Clearing for Loyalty Programs
Loyalty programs require lots of back-office work, which includes manually entering data from receipts into a database system. On top of this, a back-office employee is also required to manually check all the receipts, in order to confirm the validity of the loyalty campaigns.
This means that specific data fields, such as date, total amount or line items, need to be manually entered into a database. With data entry automation in loyalty programs, there is no need for such hassle, which allows companies to reduce processing times, eliminate human errors and improve customer satisfaction.
Automating the data entry process can be done by many intelligent processing solutions, but only some of them deliver qualitative data and are able to improve your overall efficiency. Klippa for instance, not only automates data entry, but the whole document processing workflow.
Automate Data Entry with Klippa
With Klippa, you can forget about tedious manual data entry and implement a seamless and efficient data entry flow, designed specifically for your workflow. Here are our two data entry solutions:
Klippa DocHorizon
Klippa DocHorizon is an Intelligent Document Processing platform designed to empower your business to overcome the challenges of manual data entry. Our platform leverages the power of AI-powered OCR and ML to accurately extract data from documents, verify the accuracy, and seamlessly integrate it into your existing systems.
Klippa DocHorizon IDP platform is the best choice for you, if you:
- Want to become more efficient and decrease processing times with an end-to-end solution
- Increase productivity levels in document processing by 70%
- Need to be able to detect document fraud and ensure authenticity at all times
- Process a variety of documents, be it invoices, receipts, identity cards or bank statements
- Have cross-border business activity and need global document coverage, for all Latin alphabet languages
- Stay compliant with GDPR and ISO regulations, ensuring privacy and security of sensitive information, without storing any data
Klippa SpendControl
If your main business model focuses on spend management, then Klippa SpendControl is your go-to solution. This expense management application allows you to not only automate data entry for invoices and receipts, but also:
- Automate invoice processing and perform two-way matching to ensure document authenticity
- Gain real-time access to your invoice approval system, so you can do it from wherever you want
- Streamline expense reimbursement with smart business expense cards, perfect for your corporate travel expenses
- Fully automate the accounts payable process, decreasing the overall processing times
- Stay compliant with GDPR and ISO regulations, making sure your business and your clients are protected at all times
Embrace the future of business operations with Klippa and transform your data entry process from a bottleneck to a competitive advantage.
Interested in learning more? Contact our experts to see firsthand the impact Klippa can have on your data entry processes or simply book a free demo down below!