Did you know that your employees spend 1-3 hours daily on data entry tasks? At least, that’s what 76% of office workers answered in a study by Zapier.
Manual data entry is one of the most tedious and repetitive tasks in your business. It’s time-consuming and prone to human errors that prevent you from effective operations.
You most likely are aware of these facts and want to improve, but the thing is, you’re like the rest of us. Extremely busy and just the thought of taking on one more task would turn your day on its head.
Fortunately for you, there exists an automated data entry solution that is easy to implement and can remove this tedious task from your to-do list once and for all.
Throughout this article, we will discuss the problems you face with manual data entry, why you should start with automated data entry today, and how to do it with Klippa DocHorizon.
The problems of manual data entry
Sure, back in the day your company didn’t process as many documents and could still manage them manually. However, your company has grown, and with that your document volume too. It’s therefore no longer possible for you to do it manually.
If you haven’t switched to an automated solution yet, you are likely to experience one or more of the following problems with manual data entry:
- It’s inefficient and time-consuming
- It leads to errors
- It disengages employees
- It results in unhappy customers
It’s inefficient and time-consuming
Let me refresh your memory on manual data entry.
Tedious, repetitive, long demanding hours and much dedication are asked from you and your fellow colleagues.
Dealing with large document volumes takes forever. With large document volumes, manual data entry becomes inefficient and time-consuming.
Just have a look at the following calculation. A person’s average typing speed is about 40 words per minute. Now let’s say that the average number of words to enter per document is 400. That means it would take about 10 minutes to complete a single document. And keep in mind, after this, you haven’t even accounted for the time needed for reviewing what was entered.
Now try to imagine having to process thousands or even millions of documents.
Either you have to hire extra staff or work countless hours in overtime or both, to complete low valuable data entry tasks. Manual data entry simply costs you immense amounts of money.
George Labovitz and YuSang Chang’s 1-10-100 rule explains this quite well.
According to this rule, it costs you 1$ to verify data accuracy at the point of entry. Then, 10$ to identify and clean data when it comes in a batch form, and even 100$ or more when inaccurate data is not corrected.
It leads to errors
Not only is the manual data entry process tedious to perform. It’s prone to errors too, which affects many areas of your business.
The typical error rate of manual data entry is about 1%. So on every 100 data entry points, you have made at least one mistake. This can lead to multiple problems for you and your business.
Some of these are:
- Human errors lead to inaccurate information which can lead to ever-increasing costs. For example, you can receive a fine because you filled out your tax statements incorrectly.
- Errors are expensive and time-consuming to fix, which becomes especially a thing when it takes a while before the errors are noticed and fixed.
- Errors create potential financial issues since even minor typos can have a huge impact on your finances.
- Errors lead to potential compliance issues such as fraud, theft, money laundering, and embezzlement.
Human errors typically end up being time-consuming and money-draining factors.
It disengages employees
Manual data entry and re-entry procedures are demanding. It takes your employees much dedication and commitment to get it right. It’s tough to stay focused and quickly demotivates employees.
With disengaged employees come additional drawbacks. It can affect your employees’ mental and physical state too.
Gallup compared disengaged against engaged employees. The results are alarming.
Disengaged employees have:
- 61% higher likelihood of burnout
- 48% higher likelihood of daily stress
- 66% higher likelihood of daily worry
- Double the rate of daily sadness and anger
By being disengaged, employees struggle to fully focus and ultimately become a risk to your organization.
It results in unhappy customers
Customer data needs to be handled with great care. Your customer database contains valuable information that facilitates how your business conducts future operations.
Data errors can cause a rippling effect throughout your entire business, affecting decision-makers, managers, line workers, and others. Eventually, it can decrease customer satisfaction and acquisition rates.
When you get dissatisfied customers, you have a problem. One unhappy customer tells 9-15 people about their experience. And nearly 13% tell more than 20 people. The word spreads faster than you can fix it.
Can I not just outsource my data entry tasks?
Yes, of course you can, but you shouldn’t! It’s often a lot cheaper and seems like an easy escape, but there are various drawbacks that come from outsourcing in general.
The three most noticeable drawbacks are:
- Exposure of sensitive information; since there is always a certain risk involved when third parties have access to your company data.
- Shared attention and support; because outsourced data entry specialists also deal with other clients.
- Misaligned priorities and goals; because many vendors won’t operate in your best interest. They are driven by profit and not by your company’s goals and quality standards.
As you can tell, these are critical topics that should be handled with great care. Outsourcing your data entry tasks is therefore often not the preferred option.
Now, let’s have a look at what you should have done a long time ago, automating data entry tasks!
The benefits of automated data entry you’re missing out on today
Surely you would like to avoid entering data for hours every single day. With an automated data entry solution, that becomes possible.
You could stand out from your competitors, but since you are still stuck with manual data entry, you’re missing out on huge benefits.
The most important ones are:
- You could save up to 70% in time and money
- You could have 97% fewer errors
- You could have happy and productive employees
- You could minimize the paperwork
You could save up to 70% in time and money
You keep on wasting large sums of money on each day that goes by.
Meanwhile, organizations that have implemented an automated data entry solution are experiencing effective operations. They save over 70% of time and money.
Data entry automation is the key to faster and more efficient data entry operations. Your employees and colleagues free up time to spend on more value-adding tasks.
By extensively minimizing time spent on data entry, you bring down overhead costs. You would no longer need to worry about hiring extra staff or working overtime.
You could have 97% fewer errors
Currently, you are troubled with errors that occur during manual data entry, and they can turn expensive really fast.
However, if you use an automated data entry solution, you won’t have these concerns.
Machines and computers will always beat humans on repetitive and tedious data entry tasks. No distractions or personal issues will affect their work. They stay 100% focused and their output is consistent.
Even better, if a solution is powered by AI, it can learn from its mistakes and optimize results over time, reducing your error rate by 97%.
You could have happy and productive employees
You, your employees, and your colleagues are possibly disengaged. It might feel like normal by now.
As we discussed earlier, disengaged employees are risky for businesses.
Replacing repetitive entry tasks with AI gives you the freedom and flexibility to focus on more important tasks. Consequently, you and your colleagues will work more on tasks you enjoy doing, and be 70% more productive at it.
You could minimize the paperwork
Nowadays you might be stuck behind piles of paperwork. Coffee gets spilled over them, making them unreadable and they end up lost amongst hundreds of other important documents.
You already put in much time and effort to just find them the next day, unreadable and unusable. Your hard work and dedication didn’t pay off.
With automated data entry software, documents can be digitized, so that you don’t need to worry about piles of paperwork and unreadable documents anymore.
Why automate your data entry with Klippa
This blog explained to you why manual data entry is a problem, and why automated data entry is the future. Organizations around the world are continuously striving for more effective operations.
Klippa builds various technologies that help businesses like yours avoid the pain you’re experiencing and make your life easier.
Klippa DocHorizon
Klippa DocHorizon is our Intelligent Document Processing (IDP) solution. It is used to automate data entry tasks for companies in many industries.
With our solution, that is powered by OCR and AI, you can extract, classify and verify important data within seconds. Unstructured data can instantly be structured and stored in your company’s databases.
If you wonder from which document types we can extract data, here are a few examples:
Partners that use Klippa DocHorizon save time, reduce cost and prevent fraud. Are you ready to improve your bottom line with automated data entry?
Contact Klippa now
If you have any questions on how we can help you, don’t hesitate to contact us now! Our experts are ready to help figure out the right solution for you.
You can also book a free online demo with one of our product specialists via the form below.