08 Jun Types of Forms That Can Be Captured with Document Capture Software

In this era of digitisation, document capture system is at its highest demands as companies are rapidly making their workplaces completely paperless. They have understood the long-term benefits for document capture and most importantly, with all the competitors and clients using the same technology, it is mandatory to be on the same page. With advanced document capture software every document can be captured which was not the case previously. Starting from handwritten documents to fully structured documents, the following are the form types that document capture software can capture.

Structured Forms – Structured forms are those that have a proper format and the format is already stored in the document capture software. They are electronic documents and hence, the format is perfect. They can be scanned and the data from those documents can be extracted without any challenges. They help in faster capturing and processing.

To capture structured forms, simple scanning without any distortion is enough. The software will process the document after scanning. If the software is not modern or advanced, then optical character recognition (OCR) technology has to be used to make the system identify all the printed characters and blocks easily as per the format set in the software.

Semi-Structured Forms – These are forms that have some fixed format for a certain portion and the rest of it has a variable format. For example, invoice where the letterhead, the space for writing total amount and the footer are fixed and they can be scanned instantly. But the body of the invoice contains a number of items which are variable and they can also be written by hand. In those cases, the capturing and processing speed will be greater and require advanced software for interpreting the variable portion.

If the semi-structured form is a machine-printed document without any handwritten character, OCR machine and simple document capture software will be enough to capture and process the form. But if a certain portion of it has a handwritten part, then intelligent character recognition(ICR) technology would be required. OCR would capture that document and ICR software will interpret the handwritten characters by analyzing the pattern of each character and matching it with the corresponding database. This is exactly where the chances of error are there and hence, one needs to manually check after the processing is done.

Unstructured Forms – These forms have no fixed format like books and journals. They can also be images and audio, video recordings. They can also be an attachment to an email or the email itself, web page or any word-processor document. It is needless to say that capturing such documents and processing them will take a lot of time and advanced software and algorithm.

Unstructured documents require ICR software to interpret them close to perfection. It will take relatively longer time to process and the chances of errors are high.

Apart from these, there are some other forms that are captured in daily like barcoded forms where information about the form is stored, optical mark forms like answer sheets and forms with patch codes.

CaptureFast allows users to capture structured and semi-structured documents using OCR technology through tis mobile app. Leave your information for an invitation to the CaptureFast beta release here.