Form Capture - Giving Businesses The Information They Need Faster

Form capture is one of the services that has been around for a number of years but the majority that could use it effectively don't know it exists, let alone that it could actually help them considerably.

So what is form capture? Well as the title suggests, it is the capture of forms, but to go a little deeper into that, it is the capturing of data from forms that have been entered or written by the person who has sent it back. In other words, form capture services enable businesses to access this data quickly without the need to manually go through each and every form and extract the data manually, by hand.

This is done primarily using computer automation to speed up the process using high specification computer systems and top quality, often specially developed in house software that ensure that accuracy is of a high quality to ensure that you get the best results back precisely. This software is able to search through your forms, whether it be 100 or 1,000,000, searching for appropriately checked boxes which then registers this information into categories. Once the process is completed, a document is produced containing information on how many people checked the certain boxes. From this, depending on the capabilities of the company completing the work for you, this can be converted into an easy to understand and presentable document which can be used in presentations which can contain charts to aid the ability to see with more emphasis the results that have come back.

Form capture can be used in a number of different ways; it can be used for job applications, customer surveys, street surveys, staff records among the many others out there. Because of the convenience of a capture service like this, thousands of companies around already benefiting from their uses.

For the most part, form capture is not able to pick up handwriting in general, so if you have a comments area or a form containing a lot of writing, it's recommended that you also ask the company that you use if they can also do data entry on it, which means that the information would need to be put down by hand into the computer. This might seem like overkill, however it is a very necessary part of the process as the most important information tends to come within that which is hand written., particularly in the cases of customer service surveys.

Often clients also wonder if the form must be set up in a certain way in order for the software to be able to read it properly. This can depend, again on the capabilities of the companies that are offering the service, but there are some out there where it won't matter as the software can easily scan one document, know where to look for important information and then do the same with the rest of the forms.

Form capture is often not an expensive service as it can be completed fairly quickly thanks to the automation aspect so is not only an excellent service for companies doing research, it is also an inexpensive one too.

Check out the companies you are looking to use and look for good credentials such as the ISO 9001:2000 which guarantees quality as it is audited by the ISO. Also look out for the ISO, which is a sure sign of high quality data protection from that particular company.