Invoices, worker contracts, tax forms, training materials, and more – any thriving organization has plenty of documents to keep track of.
Despite the digital age’s penchant for making paper-pushing a thing of the past, there’s still a big demand for paper documents in the workplace. This means it’s important to be able to take a digital document and print it, or a paper document and scan it.
We’ve already discussed the value of OCR and its importance when it comes to scanning legal documents.
Legal scanning and legal scanning services are important, but they aren’t all which matters when it comes to documents. But what about for purely organizational purposes?
Can this process be useful for helping a company avoid the clutter of disorganized documents, and can it help them retrieve important ones when needed?
Here’s a little refresher about the basics and history of OCR, as well as how it can help with important organizational practices like document management.
What is OCR? Why is it So Valuable Beyond Legal Scanning?
OCR stands for optical character recognition. It’s a process by which a computer can convert a scanned image into text. The scanned image is analyzed by software, which differentiates between darker and lighter areas to determine what the text is.
The benefit of this is, previously, a text document was considered just an image once scanned. Whether it was handwritten or printed, it was still in an image format and thus impossible to edit, search, and organize like normal text documents.
OCR is valuable because it makes converting and sorting documents much easier, allowing paper copies to be read just like digital files are.
The benefits of this in terms of keeping copies of legal documents around are obvious. The same could be said for keeping important financial data like invoices and receipts. But what about from a purely organizational perspective – does OCR have a noticeable impact on a business’s ability to keep things in order?
Why Paper Documents Make Organization Tough
There’s a reason more companies have gone to digital methods for nearly everything. It’s less about saving trees and more about saving headaches. An office full of papers lying all around can make it hard to find the right thing when it’s needed. Even if there isn’t a legal issue involved, this can still present problems.
Take training material, for example. A person may want to scan a page from a training manual and add it to an employee’s digital training package.
The only problem is – this makes it hard to search.
Even if it is printed out so the employee can have their own physical copy, it’s still another paper to keep up with. There’s also the matter of losing important papers when they’re needed.
Examples could include reports detailing store performance, which could be due to higher management at a certain date. If they’re printed, they constitute another document which could be lost. But for handwritten reports, simply scanning it makes it hard to search and retrieve.
Organization Isn’t Just About Being Tidy
While there is a lot of stress to be avoided when a business isn’t drowning in piles of paper, there’s also a benefit to being able to search documents with ease.
Scanning paper documents may mean they’re available digitally – but only as images. Without OCR, a business may have a hard time finding what they need.
This is especially true in organizations where multiple parties need to search up documents quickly.
For big stores or chains, it is vital to be able to search up documents by type, title, content, and more. OCR makes it easy for people to stay organized in the sense they can order files. Even if they’re handwritten or typed and rescanned back onto a computer, they can be sorted and retrieved as needed.
A company may do a lot of printing, or even work with a company offering printing services. But printing companies may recommend using OCR to help with organizational needs.
For some businesses, having the right files at the right time can mean the difference between keeping a big client and losing them. This means even if the documents in question don’t have a legal bearing, OCR can still be extremely useful.