Digital document management – Smartphone scanning tools are the essential link between stores and headquarters

Digitalized and centralized document management

Receipts contributed by service providers, cash balance documents, or medical certificates - store managers deal with a high amount of paper documents that need to be transferred to the headquarters every day. Usually, they are being collected in folders for months or sent to the responsible office via fax or postal mail. These ways of treating documents often lead to damage or loss, and slow down the workflow since mailing them can take up a lot of time. On top of that, the quality of a faxed image is usually a lot lower, and faxing machines tend to be more susceptible to failure than the average quality provided by a smartphone camera.

How it works

An app to scan documents is really simple and offers a straightforward workflow. To structure the heap of documents for your back-office, it makes sense to use basic categories. General terms like orders, repairs, shipping, promotion, or banking can be created and chosen in the app.

If you use Scanbot, the Scanner SDK can be implemented into your mobile app within a few business days. It’s entirely customizable for your company’s needs and offers functionalities such as barcode scanning, data extraction for complex documents like medical certificates, or Optical Character Recognition (OCR), which turns every document into a searchable PDF.

A digitalized workflow in your retail stores with the Scanbot Scanner SDK

Let’s take a look at how your store managers’ workflow could look like after the implementation of a retail document scanner:

1. They receive a physical document, such as an inventory certificate. This document needs to be forwarded to the headquarters now.
2. Once the internal business app has been opened, several categories such as logistics, cash register, banking, or orders are displayed to your store manager. They can then choose the correct category, which is in this case “Inventory management”.
3. They scan the document while our customizable UI leads them into the perfect scanning position. The scan is then automatically cropped and ready for the next step.
4. At this point, our OCR Scanner SDK becomes relevant. It turns the scan into an editable and searchable PDF.
5. This PDF file can now be sent to the headquarters for further processing within a few seconds.

There are numerous ways to send this file in a safe and secure way. You can use technologies like WebDAV, SFTP, or even email to transfer the PDFs instantly.

Now, since taking and processing the scan takes only a few seconds, you receive everything almost in real-time. This speeds up your business process significantly and you can easily optimize the controlling, order management, or promotions. Smartphones or tablets are also much easier to maintain and replace than traditional computers.

The main benefits of the Scanbot Scanner SDK

1. Receipts, cash balances, or inventory documents: Your store manager can scan any document type within seconds. Our user guidance feature guarantees a perfect scanning result, with no need for any manual correction. Now, the scan of the receipt can be forwarded directly to the headquarters for further processing and even automation. If you want the contained data in the form of an editable PDF file, use our OCR function to turn a physical document into a PDF within a few seconds.
2. Medical certificates: According to the BKK-Dachverband, German employees are on sick leave an average of 8% of their working days per year. Naturally, a lot of paperwork in the form of medical certificates, or so-called "Arbeitsunfähigkeitsbescheinigungen", occurs. These kinds of documents contain relatively complex structures and are consequently hard to process digitally. Our Scanbot SDK offers accurate data extraction features that put the information into a further processable format smoothly in no time. 
   

The Scanbot Scanner SDK can be adjusted completely to the needs of your retail company. Through its user guidance and auto-cropping functionalities, even inexperienced users will be able to create flawless scanning results, which don’t require any manual correction. Since our SDK is so easy to use, your employees won’t need lengthy training, using these features is intuitive and can be understood in no time. Your staff is going to love this cutting edge technology!

In case you are interested in implementing the displayed scanning functionalities, please contact us, so we can figure out the perfect solution for you. Feel free to check our other blog posts about Mobile Document Scanning and our Pricing Model.