5 Benefits of Document Processing
Raise your hand if you have ever spent an atrocious amount of time reading countless documents and entering information manually. If you have been in this kind of situation before, then you know how manual processing can be time-consuming, error-prone, and all around tedious. Luckily, with document processing, you can automate this task and save your time for work that’s more valuable and rewarding. But this is just one of the benefits of using a tool that processes documents for you. In this post, we’ll take a look at five benefits of document processing. Let’s get started.
What is Document Processing?
Simply put, document processing means using a software application to convert documents into machine-readable data.
To be specific, this includes both paper documents and digital documents, as well as typed and handwritten information. Even complex characters can now be identified with near-perfect precision.
So instead of spending hours and hours processing documents by yourself, with the right tool you can convert virtually any kind of business document into structured data, from invoices to web forms, payroll reports, and a lot more.
The benefit of saving time is pretty evident.
Document processing relies on AI-based technologies like Machine Learning, Optical Character Recognition (also known as OCR), Robotic Process Automation (RPA), and more. These technologies have been rapidly evolving over recent years and will continue to grow, making manual processing more and more obsolete.
While researching this topic, you’ll see that people talk a lot about Intelligent Document Processing as well (IDP for short). Document processing and IDP refer more or less to the same concept, with the difference being that IDP incorporates more advanced AI technologies, like Natural Language Processing, to do things like classifying text, creating summaries of content, and analyzing text to understand its meaning.
So I have mentioned the huge time savings you can achieve with document processing. That alone is a huge advantage to have. But there’s more to it. So let’s jump into each of the five benefits of document processing.
5 Benefits of Document Processing
1) Save time
As you can imagine, this is the biggest benefit of document processing. Employees don’t have to spend enormous amounts of time inputting data. With the right document processing solution, you can turn countless hours of manual work into just a few minutes of automated processing. You can imagine how helpful that would be for your business:
Saving time is a huge advantage in any industry. Businesses operating in finance, healthcare, and logistics in particular find document processing to be a big game-changer.
2) Save money
Naturally, when you save time, you save money. By investing in a document processing solution, you pay less money for hours spent inputting data manually. You also don’t have to hire additional staff to process documents or outsource that task to another company.
Furthermore, employees can spend more time on revenue-generating work like customer service and marketing. It follows that your bottom line will improve.
You also save money by preventing the cost of human error. Data accuracy is a big problem in business, which leads us into the third benefit.
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2) Improve data accuracy
To err is human. People who enter data manually will make a mistake sooner or later. What’s more, data accuracy will drop even lower when there is a large amount of documents to process and not enough time or people.
Processing errors can lead to mistakes that damage customer satisfaction and your reputation. And then there is the additional cost and stress that comes with the need to rectify incorrect data.
Document processing solutions, on the other hand, can capture data with higher accuracy than humans. By changing the way you process documents, your database will contain fewer incorrect names, addresses, and figures.
This increased data quality also means you can surface more valuable insight from your data to guide your strategic decisions, like incorporating new measures to improve the customer experience.
3) Streamline processes
Manual processing often creates bottlenecks in processes and slows down operations. Shifting to document processing, on the other hand, will help you streamline your document-centric processes. They take less time and require fewer people. This results in:
Some of the processes that businesses can streamline with document processing include:
4) Improve security and compliance
Paper documents can be subject to loss, theft, disasters, fraud or unwanted exposure to outside parties. Thankfully, you can keep digitized data in a secure database with backups and access that is limited to authorized personnel only.
Plus, in case you’re wondering, most providers of document processing solutions take measures like SSL encryption to ensure the data of their users is safe from data breaches.
In addition to that, having organized and accurate records allows for better compliance with regulations. A compliance audit can be extremely stressful and even endanger the entire business when documents are disorganized and unprotected. Document processing helps you achieve better compliance and avoid fines and penalties.
In Conclusion
In today’s world, you need to be able to work fast and reduce costs in order to be competitive. Processing your documents manually is simply not viable anymore: it costs a lot of money, detracts your staff from performing more impactful work (especially knowledge workers), and inevitably leads to costly mistakes.
This is why you should consider investing in a document processing solution that converts your documents into structured and accurate data you and your team can use right away.
If you want to learn more about document processing, head over to our website to read our blog post “What is Document Processing? And How to Get Started”.
Thank you for reading!