Scanning: The Easy Way to Capture Data
Digitising information and going paperless is no longer a futuristic ideal. It’s happening as we speak. But as with all transitions, having a good strategy is paramount. If you’re taking steps to reduce the use of paper in your organisation, scanning is the easiest and most effective way to catalogue your documents and the information they contain.
Scanning is faster, less expensive, and often more accurate than other types of data capture. Manually entering data is simply not a reasonable strategy if your organisation has many documents that need to be digitised. Even if you choose to employ the services of a third party data entry company that utilizes manual keying of information, you’ll likely find it’s more expensive and takes longer than utilizing the services of a professional scanning company like Pearl Scan.
Innovative technologies
Many people are unaware of just how sophisticated scanning software has become in recent years. Optical Character Recognition and Intelligent Character Recognition have become exceptionally effective, which means that having your documents scanned isn’t simply a process of transforming them into digital images.
On the contrary, top of the line scanning services can not only scan your documents, but they can also capture the data those documents contain. For example, Pearl Scan is able to scan a document, index each document in order to gather relative information, and then provide you with that data in a searchable database.
In addition to being used to index data from printed materials, OCR can also be used to ensure that the document files themselves are searchable. This is an enormous advantage over traditional media.
Flexibility and convenience
Having your documents scanned by a professional scanning service in order to capture your data provides you with enormous flexibility in terms of how you want your information organised, indexed, and saved. If there’s a particular file type your industry has a preference for, for example, it’s very likely that a professional scanning service can provide your documents in that form.
If you need your employees to be able to access this data, anytime and anywhere, it can be uploaded to a cloud storage service. If, on the other hand, you wish to restrict access to this data, you can opt for keeping it on a USB thumb drive or CDs, etc.
Scanning your documents to capture data is one of the best choices you’ll make in the transition to a paperless workplace.