Imagine that you have a member of your office staff that you pay $20 per hour.
Each day, that staff member spends only about 30 minutes doing manual data entry.
No big deal, right? The job is getting done, and you trust your team member to do a great job (even if the task is a wee bit boring).
Well… if you consider that on average, there are 250 working days per year, that half-hour-per-day adds up to 125 hours per year. At $20 per hour, the cost of that labor ends up being $2,500 annually!
These figures get even more shocking if you have multiple employees and/or perform more manual data entry.
We’re not even factoring in opportunity costs here. What other, possibly more important things, could your staff have been doing during the time they spent on manual data entry?
That is the true cost of manual data entry.
How Xerox Tools Reduce or Outright Eliminate the Surprisingly High Cost of Manual Data Entry
There are many tools, apps, software suites, and services from Xerox that can help reduce the amount of manual data entry that your organization has to perform. However, it’s likely that Xerox’s Capture and Content Intelligent Data Processing service is going to perform extremely well for you. This system is the “rocket fuel” of data processing automation!
Using a combination of technologies including artificial intelligence, machine learning, and optical character recognition, intelligent data processing is a system that can extract data from documents in a surprisingly intelligent way. For example, feed it a stack of old subcontractor invoices and tell it to extract their names and mailing addresses and it can—even if every invoice looks different and has that information located at a different spot on the page.
What happens to data after extraction? That’s up to you. It can be added to a database of your choosing, or further processed into different documents, including spreadsheets. The possibilities are extremely impressive, and beyond the initial setup, no human interaction is required. How’s that for automation?
To learn more about intelligent data processing, we recommend our blog post What Happens After You Scan? Understanding the Role of IDP in Document Workflows.
Other Xerox Tools To Consider for Further Optimizing and Automating Your Workflows
While Capture and Content is an excellent choice for many organizations, perhaps your data entry needs aren’t quite so complex. Instead of the example above, where we had many different types of invoice that needed to have data extracted from them, maybe the documents you work with are always the same—the process is simple, but time consuming.
This is where Robotic Process Automation (RPA) comes in. Similar in function (but not execution) to intelligent data processing, RPA is a great option to consider for repetitive, rules-based data manipulation tasks. You can learn more about it in our post The Role of Robotic Process Automation in Streamlining Repetitive Business Tasks.
Tired of Paying Hidden Costs for Manual Document Handling? We’re Here To Help You Upgrade to Modern Xerox Technology
Hopefully after reading this post you have a better idea of just how expensive manual data entry can really be—and that now you have some great ideas on how to reduce or eliminate those expenses. If you’re thinking that it’s time to upgrade your office to more modern office equipment capable of these feats and much more, we’re here to help guide you to making the best decisions for your unique use case and goals. Please contact us today or request a free online quote to get started.
