Many businesses hold off on automating their data entry processes because it’s seen as an additional expense, but in fact — the opposite is true. Manual data entry, especially on a large scale, has several pain points and can actually cost a company more in the long run. (Need proof? Check out how businesses can save billions with our Word document attachment parsing feature.) In this post, we’ll take a look at some of those pain points.
1. Labor Cost
When considering a manual system for data entry, the cost of labor needs to be taken into account. For a manual system to be effective, your staff needs to be well trained and properly motivated to enter data cleanly, without errors, and follow the same format rules for fields like dates, dollars amounts, etc. And unlike an automated system that only needs to learn your processes once, a manual system requires constant training to ensure all staff are following the same procedure, especially since jobs like data entry tend to have high turnover.
2. Security Risks
Perhaps hiring a data entry team within your organization is too costly. Another option would be outsourcing the work. Unfortunately, there are some issues here as well. Not only does it take a significant amount of time to find the right provider, agree on terms, and explain your specific use-case, but there is also a security risk that comes along with outsourcing a data entry service. If your data contains any sensitive information, using a third-party service provider could weaken your security as you may not have full control over the service provider’s operations and practices.
3. Time Consuming
Manual data entry takes time, plain and simple. According to Reference.com, the average person’s KPH (Keystroke Per Hour) is around 8000 with some data entry clerks hitting as high as 15,000. While a 15,000 KPH is impressive, this is still considerably slower than an automated system. These statistics also don’t take into account the cost of correcting the inevitable mistakes made while performing manual data entry.
4. Higher Error Rate
One of the biggest pitfalls of a manual data entry system is the higher error rate. After all, we’re all human and even the most careful employees do make mistakes. And with a manual system, increased speed usually translates to decreased accuracy.
5. Inconsistency
We’ve already established that it’s impossible to achieve 100% accuracy with a manual system 100% of the time. And any errors can create inconsistencies that can impact the accuracy of your reporting, and the searchability of your data. To help counteract this, many companies invest in some sort of review or quality check process to ensure accuracy and benchmark error rates. However, this takes time and creates an additional cost.
While many companies shy away from automating their data entry processes because they think the initial cost of time investment will be too high, there are many advantages in using an automated system, and it’s probably not as cost- or time-intensive as you think. If you’re considering automating your data entry process, check out how to convert PDF files into structured data with Docparser.
