Every organization has paper documents that record various activities which are important for their day to day working. But with paper documents piling up, organizations are turning to document scanning. A document scanning company scans paper documents into digital format. Digitizing important documents helps to manage and preserve valuable data and reduces physical storage space.
- Two Types of Capture: Digitization of documents can be in two ways depending upon business objective- capturing the image of the document and extracting relevant data from the document. Paper documents are often converted into digital format like PDF, JPEG or TIFF formats. Sometimes, data can be processed to extract data from a business form. For example, digitizing credit card applications means only the data on the form is captured and then placed in a database. An image of the form usually isn’t kept unless there’s a need to keep an image of your signature.
- Prepping the Document for Scanning: Once you have decided on which data you want to digitize, the next step is to prep the paper document for digitizing, like removing the stapler pins, sticky notes, unfolding the corners of the paper, and repairing torn pages. Once the pages are prepped, the next step is to sort them into batches.
- Document Audit: Filing cabinets can hold huge volumes of documents and there may be multiple copies of the same document. Do an audit of your files to eliminate duplicated and unnecessary documents. This will save time and money.
- Conversion of Documents: Scanning the paper documents is not an easy task. Paper documents should be converted into searchable digital content. The document scanning vendor should be capable of suggesting apt equipment and optical character recognition software best suited for the customer’s need. Documents can be captured in digital format using a fax machine, camera phone, multi- function printer and scanners. The digitized document can be saved in any number of formats like TIFF, JPEG, PDF or GIF.
- Image Clean up: Documents may be old or of poor quality. While digitizing them, the quality of the digitized image can be improved using advanced software which includes features like:
- Deskew: straighten images that are scanned crooked
- Rotate: converts documents fed in incorrectly to the right orientation
- Despeckle: removes dots from the document
- Blank and double page detection: blank pages can be deleted and a double-feed alert allows you to rescan the document
- Quality Control: Digitized data needs to be validated by an expert or using an automated process like database lookups. It helps to flag poor quality images and documents that needs to scanned again.
- Recognition Technology: Recognition software reads the data so that it can be indexed. Different recognition technology are:
- OCR: recognizes machine printed characters
- Zonal: used for specific fields on a form
- OMR: recognizes check boxes, filled- in bubbles etc
- ICR: for hand printed characters
- Barcodes: read and extracts blank pages can be deleted and a double-feed alert allows you to rescan the document
- Security of Data: Once the conversion of paper documents is done, the documents should be kept safe and secure. The digital copies of important documents can be saved in disk or flash drives. It prevents the files from damage.
- Indexing your Document: if your documents are not indexed, you find it difficult to retrieve them. There are different ways to index documents like auto indexing with barcodes or manually indexing with the help of data entry professionals.
- Post Digitizing: Once the documents are digitized, it becomes easier to access your documents. With digitized data, businesses can eliminate the need for filing cabinets, ensure a seamless workflow, and improve customer service.
If you are planning to digitize your valuable documents, seek the help of a professional document scanning and conversion company for better results. Hiring document scanning services reduces the burden of managing huge volumes of data. These vendors have trained and skilled professionals who work with the latest technologies to provide quality services at affordable rates and in short turnaround time.
