Document data extraction – capture information effortlessly

Numerous service apps and mobile applications for digital document management already include scan tools to digitize paper documents. Now, it’s time to take this one step further and enable the automated processing of these documents. This is where document data extraction comes into play.

Modern document data extraction software leverages Optical Character Recognition (OCR) and machine-learning algorithms to detect relevant data on structured documents and extract it. 

Data extraction eliminates the need to manually enter information from documents such as passports or medical certificates. Not only does this speed up workflows, it also cuts errors.

In this article, we’ll explore the advantages of automated document data extractions and its key use cases.

What is data extraction?

Traditionally, document data extraction involved manual processes of identifying and retrieving relevant information from various types of documents. However, this is slow, labor-intensive, and prone to human error.

In today’s automated workflows, text recognition software plays an essential role in processing scanned text documents. 

While simple scanners only produce a digital image of a document, OCR technology goes one step further and converts its content into a digital text format that computers can understand and process.

While useful, full-document OCR is not the best fit for all use cases. The problem? It processes all data in a document, including filler words, payment information, or explanatory texts. 

How does an automated data extraction process work?

Unlike naive OCR, data extraction technology analyzes challenging, unstructured, or poorly structured documents. Thanks to machine learning algorithms, these systems then extract only the relevant information. 

This is particularly important for documents that contain redundant data, such as invoice numbers, dates, or totals. Data extraction collects only the required information from such documents and transfers it to your backend system, where further processing can be performed immediately.

Which documents can be captured by data extraction?

Data extraction is, therefore, a valuable feature for digital document management. But a more interesting question is: “How can your company benefit from data extraction?” In the paragraphs below, we have collected some interesting examples of document capture use cases for you:

• Customer Identification: MRZ Scanners extract data from identification documents by analyzing the machine-readable zone (MRZ) included in passports and ID cards. All core information is then immediately displayed on the end user’s device and forwarded to the back-end. 
• Healthcare: Scanbot SDK’s EHIC Scanner can extract information from European health insurance cards. This speeds up data processing in different healthcare contexts and helps you create efficient workflows, as data from complex documents no longer needs to be processed manually.
• Invoices/receipts/other forms/serial numbers: With the Scanbot Text Pattern Scanner, you can extract any single-line string of characters without scanning the whole document. This allows you to decide which information is needed for a specific purpose, flexibly. The data is immediately ready for further processing, and also no longer needs to be processed manually.
• Hospitality: A Credit Card Scanner facilitates bookings for flights, hotels, and car rentals by automatically extracting the card number (Primary Account Number or PAN), cardholder name, and expiration date. 
• Fleet management: To access vehicle history reports and other technical information, a VIN Scanner enables error-free and quick VIN searches in vehicle data banks.
• Banking: Integrating a Check Scanner into customer-facing applications enables automated check processing, enabling and improving workflows such as check truncation.

Automated vs manual document data extraction

We’ve collected the key advantages of automated data extraction compared to manual data extraction: 

1. Cost efficiency/Return on Investment (ROI): Considerable amounts of time can be saved by eliminating manual entry and corrections. Furthermore, the integration of scanning tools reduces the costs for any postal dispatch of documents, while smartphones are significantly less expensive to maintain and purchase than regular hardware scanners.
2. Speed: Data extraction accelerates your workflow significantly.
3. Convenience: Your employees do not have to filter data from photographs or scans of low quality, but can work immediately with the automatically collected data.
4. Customer Satisfaction: Simplified digital services and fast processing of requests are essential for today’s customers. Since most customers have modern smartphones, this solution can easily be made available to every user.
5. Versatility: The data scanner can be used to cover and automate a wide range of use cases.‍
6. Scalability: Automated document extraction allows for speedy processing, thus enabling staff to handle more documents than with manual processing. Besides, document extraction software itself is easily scalable, as it can easily be installed on as many devices as necessary.
7. Accuracy: Manual data extraction is error-prone. An automated solution prevents human error and increases accuracy.
8. Integration into existing systems: Data extraction software can be connected directly to existing systems, such as ERPs and CRMs, replacing cumbersome input masks.

Integrate document data extraction into your app with Data Capture Modules

The Scanbot Data Capture Modules extract data from a broad range of structured documents. Our solution includes MRZ scanning, credit card scanning, custom text pattern scanning, and many more. 

Thanks to our pre-built Ready-to-Use UI components, you can integrate a highly customizable, user-friendly interface into your application within hours. Our Classic UI components allow for even deeper customization. 

Our solutions are tried-and-tested – we listen to our customers’ feedback and regularly update our software. 

Customers like ETE Reman value how easy our SDKs are to integrate, and the comprehensive support that comes with them. Without the Scanbot SDK, ETE Reman would not have been able to offer a real-time VIN scanning feature in its solution. 

We highly value the safety of sensitive data. That’s why data is always processed fully on-device, without connection to our servers, ensuring compliance with privacy regulations. Would you like to integrate data extraction into your mobile or web app? Then send us a message at sdk@scanbot.io!