What Is Capture
Capture Community Wiki
Document capture and data capture are not the same thing. Document capture is the conversion of a paper document into an electronic image of that document. Data capture extracts data from a business form.
What kind of documents?
The document type to be scanned will determine the what kinds of scanners are needed – photos or glossy items, color documents and/or documents on colored paper, high-lighted documents, handwritten correspondence, etc. will need extra handling to ingest. Documents such as invoices, checks, claims, applications, or forms are similar, allowing the scanning speed to be optimized and are generally higher volume.
You will also need to determine for each type of document: size, single or double-sided, color or not, average number of pages, quality, and volumes (by day, week, or month and if there are seasonal or business-related variations).
Documents can be captured by:
- Scanning
- Importing electronic documents (word files, video, spreadsheets, etc.) for archiving
- Converting existing electronic documents into unalterable images
Data can be captured by:
- Replacing paper documents with electronic forms
- Extracting information through optical character recognition (OCR), reading barcodes, and reading patterns
- Exporting information to a repository, database or other data source
