There is more and more talk about forms processing software, which greatly facilitates the work of employees in the accounting department. What is characteristic of this IT solution and how we can integrate it into company structures? In the following lines we will talk about how such applications can be a “game changer” for any modern company, regardless of its size and field of development. Enjoy reading!
What is characteristic of fixed forms and under what forms we meet them everyday life?
Invoices, application forms, contracts, bills of lading – each of us has had to work with similar types of forms, the structure of which is the same in most cases. Such documents contain fields and boxes that must be filled in, but very often this whole process makes it difficult for us and takes a lot of our time.
This is the reason why more and more heads of departments and entire companies rely on software solutions to streamline the process of organizing all incoming documents with a fixed structure and unstructured. Such options give them the opportunity to facilitate their employees, who will have more time to focus on critical points of the business, and not to direct all their attention to working with forms.
It can be not only annoying, but also a prerequisite for making technical errors as a result of the manual processing of these same forms. That’s exactly what Smart Soft has developed a special software solution that combines many advantages in terms of the work routine and business image of the company. With its help, the management of a large volume of documents becomes quite possible, and in addition, the accuracy of data extraction increases.
Optical character recognition (OCR) is that technology that makes it possible to achieve excellent organization of the different types of forms, independent of their structure. Software is a great innovation that finds application in businesses – trade, healthcare, manufacturing, etc. If you also want to take advantage of the opportunity to streamline the document organization process, then Smart Software is the best solution for you.
How documents of different structure can be processed?
It’s a known fact about forms that they are highly predictable, making them easy for software like Smart Soft to handle. But what are we missing? is there a risk of difficulties occurring during this automatic process and how can we eliminate them? Before you find out the answers to these questions, familiarize yourself with the types of fixed forms:
- forms with a clear structure – from their name it is understood that it is a format that is fixed. Examples of the same are insurance claims, tax forms and some types of tests with a standard structure. In this case we are talking about documents in which the fields to be filled in and the check boxes are always in the same place. This ranks them as one of the easiest types of documents to process automatically, such as by smart software;
- documents that are semi-structured – bills of lading and invoices are among the documents that are semi-structured. The characteristic in this case is that in the presence of two documents from the same sender, it is possible to observe discrepancies in their structure. To be more specific, these same discrepancies can consist of more or less number of lines, as the generation of more pages due to the volume of information. In these cases, the software must demonstrate greater predictability;
- unstructured forms – you may guess that their structure is minimally fixed, and this defines them as challenging to process by software. Reports, letters and contracts – these all fall into the category of “unstructured documents”, the information in which can vary significantly, making their structure unclear. In order to be analyzed using OCR, it is necessary to apply natural language processing – NLP as well. These two functionalities in combination will produce the desired results as Smart Soft can handle this challenge perfectly as well.
So far it becomes clear what is the way to analyze and organize documents with different structure, as well as what are the possible difficulties that often arise during the process. Remember that fixed forms seem easy to automate, but experience shows that this is not quite the case.
What are the possible difficulties and which documents are defined as manageable?
As we promised earlier, it’s time to also answer the question related to possible challenges during automatic document processing. In most cases, they are related to poor printing from the printers, where the resolution can vary. Another possible difficulty is unclear marking methods, as well as poor image quality. A good software system should be able to handle the selected challenges, solving them as efficiently as possible.
Conclusion
We’ll end today’s article by saying that Smart Soft’s automated invoice processing software is an absolute must when it comes to managing a large volume of documents – efficiently, quickly and correctly. Take advantage of this solution now and enjoy the great results that won’t be late!
