Understanding How Automated Form Data Entry Can be Beneficial for Businesses

Data entry is the process of transforming raw data into organized, accessible, and actionable information. Manual data entry methods are notorious for being time-consuming and error-prone. Fortunately, new technology has made automated form data entry possible and incredibly easy to set up. 

If you’ve ever dedicated hours to transferring information between different formats, you understand the reasons behind this sentiment. It entails no room for creativity, problem-solving, or engaging in higher-level thinking; instead, it’s a task that can numb the mind. 

Imagine a world where your employees are liberated from the time-consuming task of manually entering data, freeing them to focus on more strategic and valuable tasks. Being able to automate data entry makes this dream a reality! 

The basics of automated data entry:

Automated data entry is an advanced process for streamlining data extraction from various sources and inputting it into databases — with workers requiring zero or minimal manual data entry. This innovative approach makes it easy to capture, validate, and organize data from virtually any document, including PDFs, emails, online forms, images, and more. From there, the data entry solution can automatically categorize the information and convert it into structured data. 

To do this, data entry automation solutions require collaboration between various tools. For example, optical character recognition (OCR), a technology that’s been around for decades, allows systems to recognize and extract text from PDFs and image files and convert it into manipulatable data. Machine learning and AI can then recognize this text, automatically apply labels, or conduct other actions to convert it into usable data. This significantly reduces errors, enhances data accuracy, and drastically improves the overall efficiency of data management processes. 

What is data entry automation? 

This is more complex than it might initially appear. See, by its nature, data entry is a manual process. It’s when a human user takes information from one location and transfers it to another—for example, taking pen-and-paper records and adding them to a spreadsheet. 

One definition of data entry automation is any system that replicates these human interactions. However, just a minute ago, we said that manual data entry processes often indicate a deeper problem with how your business manages information. Therefore, straightforward replication is a bit like papering over the cracks. We also need to think about how to use automation to eliminate the need for data entry. 

Different ways to automate manual data entry processes:

There are different types of data entry tasks that you can automate. Each of them needs a specific automation tool. 

  • Data entry from documents:

This type of data entry extracts vital data from documents like PDFs, scanned documents, images, audio, videos, etc. It stores them in a structured format for easy retrieval in the future. 

For example, you can: 

  • Extract the texts from scanned documents 
  • Extract invoice and the receipt data from PDFs 
  • Extract contact data from the business card photos 
  • Convert PDFs into highly editable formats such as Word or Excel 
  • Transcribe audio or video files into text 

  • Data entry from emails:

You can extract the data from emails to capture leads, inquiries, and other conversations essential for your business’s success. Not to mention organizing the attachments for those emails. 

It would be tiring to manually process the hundreds of emails daily. Instead, you can also automate data entry using dedicated email parsing tools. 

  • Data entry from online sources:

Another prevalent data entry task is extracting the data from online sources, like the websites and social media posts. 

This is usually automated with tools that involve web scraping or web mining.  

  • Data entry using forms:

This type of data entry gathers data from surveys to get customer satisfaction, employee reviews, and feedback about a product or service. 

You can create an automated form using the form builder software. 

  • Data entry for analysis and reporting:

This type of data entry gathers data from multiple apps and stores it in one place for analysis and reporting purposes. Collecting data from the apps and doing analytics on them will give businesses a holistic view of their performance. This will also be useful in creating strategies for a better future.