How Technology is Overruling the Human Involvement in Data Entry?

Hadia Nassim
3 min readJul 30, 2018

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Data entry services require entry of data from different mediums such as electronic forms, paper documents, images etc. into some other medium or database. Previously, data entry services were all performed manually and the entire responsibility of handling data entry services was up to man alone. With the technological advancements in all the fields, data entry services have also incorporated technology now, that has become the main component of them.

These technological advancements have helped a lot in simplifying the entire process of performing data entry services and in carrying out the conversion of large volumes of data into different documents, spreadsheets and databases. The most popular technologies include Optical Character Recognition and Optical Mark Recognition. With these technologies, human involvement in data entry services is being replaced fast. There are many organizations that have incorporated automated data entry services in all of their core business activities.

Let’s see the impact of automated data entry services on businesses to analyze the extent to which technology has overruled the human involvement in data entry services. With the involvement of technology, data entry services have become efficient and data entry specialists no longer have to work on handwritten documents. Instead, they are seen using automation and a number of software applications for processing and compilation of electronic data processing. There are different software applications used for increasing the readability of data.

Popularity of Automated Data Entry Services

Some of the main reasons behind popularity of automated data entry services include the reduction in risks included with manual data entry, lower costs and faster data processing. When there is a major involvement of textual information, the chances of manual errors are higher. The human errors can be a spelling mistake, typing mistake, incorrect formatting etc. With technology involved in data entry services, better accuracy and lower costs are ensured.

There are different software applications that can easily perform conversion of data by correctly recognizing characters in scanned documents. Also, using a few resources only, you can process large volumes of data without any interruption as compared to manual data entry. This helps in providing clients with a faster turnaround and reducing the overall delivery time of performing data entry services.

Has Technology Actually Replaced the Need of Manual Data Entry?

Though technology is undoubtedly dominant these days in cutting the overall expenses of data entry services, but it can never replace the human involvement. In case of a poor-quality document, manual data entry is required as the information might not be captured correctly from pixelated documents and this requires higher level of accuracy. Also, the conversion lifecycle cost of automated data entry services might be higher.

OCR software doesn’t always guarantee 100% results as it solely depends upon the quality of the document. For correcting inaccuracies of OCR-based work, a lot of labor is required. For spreadsheet documents, it’s not recommended as there are chances of high error rates during conversion. Also, for many services like mailing list conversion or data extraction, manual data entry is required. Therefore, technology can though provide a lot of benefits in data entry but can never replace the need of performing manual data entry services.

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