Document processing is the conversion of physical documents – whether already typed and printed, or hand-written – into electronic ones. This is achieved by a variety of means, including just scanning and conversion to pdf, optical character recognition and intelligent character recognition, amongst others. The advantage of this is that the files created as a result can be moved to a document management system, allowing for far greater flexibility in their later use, sharing and so on. It can also be used to transform invoice processing, so that instead of manual copies being made the whole system can be automated – with benefits in terms of efficiency, time scales and accounting.

Document processing has come a long way in the last decade or so. Before, there was no reasonable way for physical letters and memos to be turned to Word documents; instead the best that could be achieved was a scanned picture. These took up a lot of disk space (at a time when storage was more costly and far more limited) and, of course, could not be edited. Now, optical character recognition (OCR) has come of age. Intelligent character recognition (ICR) is a progression of this, and can even be used to understand handwriting and turn it into an electronic file. This generally uses a neural network and ‘learns’ to understand handwriting as it goes along. This means that first results may be quite poor, although when the system is properly ‘taught’ it can lead to 97 percent accuracy – with obvious efficiencies to enjoy, especially if such documents would usually be transcribed by employees.

The nature and sophistication of document processing that you choose will depend on your budget and needs of your company – obviously a smaller outfit with fewer documents will probably not benefit from the most expensive and extensive form of ICR. However, document management is an important step in bridging the gap between past practices and truly paperless offices. Although emails are easily the most popular form of written communication, plenty of people still use notes and letters, and many documents are sent through the post. These can all-too-easily be lost or mislaid if they are not carefully tracked. The same is true of invoices, but invoice processing can bring your procedures for paper invoices in line with those submitted by bacs and other electronic means. This makes for far greater efficiency and fewer mistakes.

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